Fogerty has had better luck than most, but overall, this is an unfortunate autobiography.
A memoir by the Creedence Clearwater Revival founder and writer of canonical 1960s songs such as “Proud Mary” and “Down on the Corner.”
Sensitive readers will cringe from the beginning, when Fogerty, that great exponent of gritty swamp rock though a child of the Bay Area, hazards that the fact that he had a black babydoll as an infant “predisposed me to love black music, black culture,” while a beloved recording of “Camptown Races” predisposed him to imagine himself a Southerner just as Stephen Foster, a native of Pittsburgh, did. Certainly the poverty of his childhood gave the author authentic working-class credentials, though he became a working musician as a teenager and hit stardom early on. Fogerty’s account of that ascent is full of previously aired grudges against Fantasy Records head Saul Zaentz, who locked him into a punishing contract that he admittedly didn’t read. He doesn’t have a lot of good to say about his former band mates, either; he grumbles that they were suing him over trademark issues even as he was wrapping up this book. One wishes better of Fogerty, who’s written so many enduring songs but whose best moments here are in the fannish geekdom of 45 records and guitar heroes—even if some of the worst moments are tossed-off assessments of his own contemporary favorites. On Brad Paisley: “He is obviously one of the most talented guitar players that has ever lived.” On Bruce Springsteen: “A really great guy.” The least satisfying moments are when Fogerty turns over authorship to his wife, Julie, who may have saved him from addiction but who can’t quite redeem this book. “I try and have him be in the moment,” she writes blandly, “unrehearsed and wonderfully him.” The effort, joint and individual, is obviously well-intentioned, but the book is largely unrevealing, a pale shadow compared to, say, Keith Richards’ Life (2010) or Neil Young’s Waging Heavy Peace (2012).
Fogerty has had better luck than most, but overall, this is an unfortunate autobiography.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-316-24457-2
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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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