Unsparing tell-all biography of country-music icon Buck Owens (1929–2006).
Although Owens always played up his country-gentleman public image, former Tennessean and Washington Post editor Sisk (Honky-Tonks: Guide to Country Dancin’ and Romancin’, 1995) exposes him as a cutthroat businessman, a dishonest and abusive bandleader and a wife-beating womanizer, among other things. Through in-depth interviews with Owens’s former bandmates, wives, girlfriends and business associates, the author provides a hatchet job with a heart. Sisk posits an all-consuming fear of poverty behind Owens’s take-no-prisoners pursuit of money; however, the author never apologizes for any of her subject’s dirty deeds. Growing up in small-town Texas during the Depression, in the 1950s Owens moved to Bakersfield, Calif., to make it as a guitar picker, inadvertently founding the “Bakersfield” sound, a harder-edged alternative to the syrupy Nashville style. By the early ’60s, there was a worldwide audience for his music—the Beatles even covered his signature song, “Act Naturally.” But as soon as Owens had a modicum of power, writes the author, he abused it. His crack backing band, the Buckaroos, not only served as Owens’s underpaid sidemen but also as his general factotums. He took pleasure in ruining careers and sometimes even had the FBI investigate his rivals. Meanwhile, he slept with thousands of women on the road, mostly while married to one of several wives he abused over the years. Ultimately, the mindless hayseed romp Hee Haw and its decades-long TV syndication confirmed Owens as one of the wealthiest stars in any musical genre. After amassing a fortune of more than $100 million—in addition to music, he built an empire of TV and radio stations and cattle ranches—he retired quietly in the 1980s. Yet Sisk suggests that Owens died a lonely miser who could buy everything except a satisfied mind—the classic Faustian victim of success. A tough but fair portrait of Owens’s three faces: talented musician, genius businessman and despicable creep.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-55652-768-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2010
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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