An earnest account of a friendship featuring anecdotes of celebrity encounters.
In an episodic debut memoir, Kemp, with Friedman (Cowboy Logic, 2006, etc.), recalls his lifelong friendship with a world-famous musician.
In 1953, when he was 11, Kemp went to summer camp in northern Wisconsin and met Bobby Zimmerman, a confident 12-year-old who carried a guitar around and told everyone he would grow up to be a rock star. Zimmerman, of course, later changed his name to Bob Dylan, left his Midwestern roots behind, and found fame and fortune in New York City. Kemp poses the book’s driving question early on: “What happens when your closest friend from childhood becomes one of the most famous people in the world, seemingly overnight?” The book’s answer: Keep him close. As Kemp colorfully details, their bond was never over music but shared memories of youth and the easy affection of childhood friendship. Thanks to “Bobby,” Kemp rubs elbows with celebrities. As such, the book offers numerous cameos, as when Kemp visited Dylan on the Mexico set of the Sam Peckinipah–directed film Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, met musician/actor Kris Kristofferson, and went on a road trip through the country with actor Harry Dean Stanton. Overall, this book offers readers a remarkable look at the nature and meaning of a friendship that lasts through the years, and, throughout, Kemp tells of how he admires and cherishes Dylan’s talent without coveting it. Still, he can’t help comparing himself to his friend: “Bobby had become Bob and had started changing the world,” the author writes. “I had built up a very successful fish business. Not bad for two small town dropouts!” That said, the author does seem overeager to establish bona fides with name-dropping at times; at Dylan’s shows and on tours, including the 1975-1976 Rolling Thunder Revue, which he produced, Kemp tells of meeting Cher, Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez, and other dignitaries of 20th-century popular music. The tone of Kemp’s writing is nostalgic and warm, if mostly reportorial; fortunately, this strategy works well for the material, and the presence of Dylan, a vital and enigmatic figure, gives the book a charge that the prose itself sometimes lacks.
An earnest account of a friendship featuring anecdotes of celebrity encounters.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-73300-121-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Westrose Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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