This impressive, compendious biography is a must-read for fans of the Beatles and other seminal rock groups of the 1960s and...
A Beatles expert recounts Sir George Martin’s (1926-2016) years producing the Fab Four’s final records, their breakup, and his career afterward.
In this final volume of the meticulous and lively biography of the famed Beatles music producer, Womack (English/Monmouth Univ.; Maximum Volume: The Life of Beatles Producer George Martin, the Early Years, 1926-1966, 2017, etc.) resumes after the release of the groundbreaking album “Rubber Soul.” The author invites us into the Beatles’ world with assurance and aplomb as he guides us through the creation of some of the group’s greatest musical achievements. In 1966, Martin observed the band grumbling about live performances and complaining about deficiencies in Martin’s Abbey Road studio. Brian Epstein, the band’s manager, explored recording at Stax Records in Memphis, but Martin was never keen to move. Meanwhile, Paul McCartney had a song about a spinster, and John Lennon wrote one influenced by his first LSD experience. As Martin recalled, “their ideas were beginning to become much more potent in the studio.” While working on a new album, the band’s “Penny Lane” single kept them high on music charts. Womack is excellent at chronicling the group’s ever increasing creative relationship with Martin as he helped channel their energy and excitement into exploring new ways of producing records. He called McCartney’s idea about using “alter egos” to sing songs on “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” a “revelation” and “She’s Leaving Home” one of the “best constructed songs they ever did.” Martin helped them score the end of “A Day in the Life” and drew upon his orchestral expertise to add strings and brass to their compositions. Womack also reveals how much influence Martin had on the placement of certain songs on the albums. After the Beatles, the wizard behind the curtain continued making his own records and producing for Jeff Beck, Cheap Trick, and Elton John.
This impressive, compendious biography is a must-read for fans of the Beatles and other seminal rock groups of the 1960s and '70s.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-912777-74-0
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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