The detailing of the actual concert reads like old news, and the sourcing could be clearer, but this is a compelling...
An incisive account of the most infamous concert debacle in rock history.
Most music fans know all they need to about Altamont, the ill-conceived and hastily planned free show near San Francisco for which the Hells Angels provided “security” and killed one man in the process. All of this was chronicled in the classic 1970 documentary Gimme Shelter. Veteran San Francisco Chronicle music journalist Selvin (Here Comes the Night: The Dark Soul of Bert Berns and the Dirty Business of Rhythm and Blues, 2014, etc.) acknowledges the film’s power. However, he writes, “the filmmakers used their material brilliantly to tell a story, but they tell only a slender slice of the entire drama and if it is not exactly a lie, it is far from the whole truth.” This book provides context and perspective, showing the sea change in rock that was taking place as the Rolling Stones attempted to reassert themselves amid the increasing dominance of San Francisco psychedelia and the spirit of Woodstock. There are all sorts of culture clashes here: between the Rolling Stones and the Grateful Dead, profiteers and anarchists, drugs and alcohol, hippies and bikers. They all came together at Altamont, a speedway more accustomed to crowds in the low thousands and a last-minute site because the Stones’ focus on their film and its distribution had complicated the process. There are more victims here than the young black man who was killed (and whose killer was acquitted), there are no heroes, and there is plenty of blame to spread around: to the Dead for suggesting the Angels, to the Angels for acting like the Angels, and to at least one suspicious character who claimed to act on the Stones’ behalf. However, Selvin concludes with most of the blood on the hands of the Stones.
The detailing of the actual concert reads like old news, and the sourcing could be clearer, but this is a compelling analysis of an event that hadn’t seemed like it needed anything more written about it.Pub Date: Aug. 16, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-244425-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
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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