One of the best rock memoirs of recent years and a revelation for fans.
The legendary piano master tells all, and delightfully.
Reginald Dwight (b. 1947) grew up with parents who “should never have got married in the first place.” Thankfully, he found deliverance in rock ’n’ roll, in which, his father commanded, “you are not to get involved.” Get involved he did, playing with a band called Bluesology that, he admitted, was pretty much like any other British white blues band, and perhaps a little less, save for a chance pairing with Long John Baldry, “maybe the greatest 12-string guitarist the UK has ever produced.” Another chance union was with a young songwriter named Bernie Taupin, who looked out on the moors and saw the Wild West. Changing his name to Elton Hercules John to shed his former skin, the astoundingly gifted pianist threw audiences into confusion; though “Britain’s least convincing flower child,” he played sort-of-hippie music, but in boas and platforms. “I started to think more about how I looked onstage,” he writes of the period around the era-defining “Your Song,” but he also realized that smashing up a piano, as opposed to Pete Townshend’s smashing a guitar, just didn’t work. He was famous from his first record on, and then rich, and then a study in addictive personality. A highlight, or perhaps lowlight, of the narrative is when, coked to the gills, he insists that Bob Dylan shed his hobo clothes for something in his glittery wardrobe only to have George Harrison caution him, “I really think you need to go steady on the old marching powder.” Now sober, a cancer survivor, and in his 70s, Sir Elton looks back at it all with grace and good humor. One might wish only that he spent as much time revealing how he came to such things as the astonishing structure of “Tiny Dancer” as he does recounting bad hair transplants and bad behavior. Even so, his memoir is a terrific read.
One of the best rock memoirs of recent years and a revelation for fans.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-14760-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2019
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PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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