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FAB

AN INTIMATE LIFE OF PAUL MCCARTNEY

Despite covering well-trodden ground, the graceful prose and superb storytelling create a riveting narrative.

Solid addition to the ever-expanding library of books about the Beatle named Paul.

Like Peter Carlin’s Paul McCartney: A Life (2009) and unlike Barry Miles’ Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now, this biography by Sounes (The Wicked Game: Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus, Tiger Woods, and the Story of Modern Golf, 2004, etc.), a Londoner who has also written bios of Bob Dylan and Charles Bukowski, was neither sanctioned nor supported by McCartney. It includes interviews with friends, family, business associates and even groupies to round out the reliance on secondary material. Fab is nearly twice as long as Carlin’s book, though it covers roughly the same period and events: McCartney’s mostly happy childhood in working-class Liverpool, rapid rise to iconic stature as a rock star, bitter divorce from Heather Mills and triumphant return to a Liverpool stage during the city’s reign as European Capital of Culture in 2008. The extra volume may be due to Sounes’s obsessive research—more than 200 interviews—and no-nonsense attention to detail. The portrait of McCartney that emerges is not only that of a talented and occasionally visionary musician but of a brilliant and often lucky businessman. On the negative side, McCartney comes across as arrogant, controlling, intolerant of dissent, a mean and stingy boss, humorless when challenged or criticized, and too much of a pothead to care. Sounes doesn’t hide his low opinion of McCartney’s post-Beatles repertoire, particularly in the lyric department. His sources agree: McCartney was at his best given a partner who gave as good as he (or she) got—someone like John Lennon or George Martin. The result of being Lennonless was the indecisive overproduction and sappy songs of Wings and the solo period during the ’80s. Family-centric living and superhuman wealth probably also inhibited the ex-Beatle’s genius, but the pain of losing Lennon, his dear wife Linda and George Harrison—not to mention the humiliation of the Mills affair—seems to have reawakened the bard and decent bloke within.

Despite covering well-trodden ground, the graceful prose and superb storytelling create a riveting narrative.

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2010

ISBN: 978-0-306-81783-0

Page Count: 640

Publisher: Da Capo

Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2010

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

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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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

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