Written with the same cool passion she brings to her lyrics, Gordon delivers a generous look at life inside the punk...
The blonde enigma from the band that spoke softly and carried a big noise tells her story, from art-chick beginnings to success to marital and musical catastrophe.
Sonic Youth fans were stunned when married co-founders Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon announced in 2011 that couple and band were no more; for 30 years, both seemed impervious to the usual marital strains. Gordon, who lost Moore to another woman, took it even harder, and the bitterness is there on the first page of this autobiography, her therapeutic self-assessment as an artist struggling to define herself in a male-dominated environment. Gordon scrutinizes herself as the daughter of a distant father and a mother who had sacrificed her ambitions and also as the masochistic sister of a cruel (and schizophrenic) older brother. It’s a history she carried with her when she headed from California to the No Wave underground of New York in 1980, where she met Moore, the lanky, punk-obsessed guitarist and soul mate who was already worshipping at the altar of CBGBs. Eventually, Gordon found herself submitting to his dominating personality. “The codependent woman, the narcissistic man: stale words lifted from therapy that I nonetheless think about a lot these days.” Of course, she also thrived—as a musician, visual artist, mother and icon. Gordon goes into intriguing detail on specific songs and doesn’t hold back on Moore or other figures, even ones with worse disasters than her own: “Courtney [Love] told me she thought Kurt Cobain was hot, which made me cringe inside and hope the two of them would never meet. We all said to ourselves, ‘Uh-oh train wreck coming.’ ”
Written with the same cool passion she brings to her lyrics, Gordon delivers a generous look at life inside the punk whirlwind.Pub Date: Feb. 24, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-229589-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
PERSPECTIVES
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
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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