A very funny and candid memoir, in an occasionally cringeworthy sort of way.
The veteran singer/songwriter delivers a memoir as “album liner notes; something extra, informative, and interesting.”
Fans of the self-lacerating, painfully funny Wainwright III will find the memoir they want here. As he writes of his club performances, “often the response I’m going for is a shiver or a cringe. Making an audience uncomfortable for limited amounts of time ratchets up the dramatic tension.” Though he remains perhaps best known for the novelty hit “Dead Skunk,” he remains better loved for material that cuts uncomfortably close to the bone of family dynamics, of his failings as a husband and a father, of his jealousies and rivalries in relationships with his own father (a well-known columnist for Life at its popular peak) and son, Rufus Wainwright, a musical artist who now has a larger and more rapturous following than his father. With a wit that can draw blood and a confessional openness that knows few limits, the author guides readers through his parents’ loveless marriage, his sibling rivalries, his tempestuous marriages and relationships, the tensions of an absentee father, his deeply ambivalent attitude toward success and stardom, and his depressive insecurities. “When I’m not thinking of myself as the greatest singer-songwriter who ever lived,” he writes, “I consider myself to be a talentless fraud.” Many of the chapters provide fuller context for his autobiographical lyrics, while others reprint some of his favorite columns of his father’s. Wainwright compares himself to those who were “stars in the music business, whereas I was merely a puny asteroid relegated to the far periphery of the rock and roll galaxy.” Yet those who have followed his career for decades—“Loud Heads,” he calls them—will delight in how much more they can learn about a songwriter who has already revealed so much in his material.
A very funny and candid memoir, in an occasionally cringeworthy sort of way.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-17702-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Blue Rider Press
Review Posted Online: July 11, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
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
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
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