Serviceable but often floridly overwritten. Though Ribowsky accuses the band’s current incarnation and those who market the...
Straightforward biography of the Southern rock band.
Though staples such as “Sweet Home Alabama” and “Free Bird” have kept Lynyrd Skynyrd’s brand alive through recordings and reunion tours for almost three decades, Ribowsky (The Last Cowboy: A Life of Tom Landry, 2013, etc.) makes a convincing case that the band died with the plane crash that took frontman Ronnie Van Zant and other passengers. However, the author overstates most of what he claims for Van Zant and the hard-drinking, rabble-rousing band, who “unwittingly but inexorably…found a place among the artistic giants of the American South, their thematic content deceptively simple but as soul deep as any Faulkner novel or Tennessee Williams play.” Of Southern rock in general, Ribowsky asserts that the “songwriters had become the modern southern literati, and in their pens lay the definitions of a new reconstruction of the South and southern manhood.” Perhaps such writing is an attempt to compensate for lack of access and primary sources, as most of the quotes are from other books and articles, while those few who agreed to talk to the author—former manager Alan Walden, booking agent Alex Hodges and guitarist Ed King—come across much better than the many who didn’t (Van Zant’s widow, the remaining, surviving band members, original producer Al Kooper). Ultimately, it’s surprising that the band lasted as long as it did, even before the tragic crash, for the musicians seemed bent on destruction, fighting and drinking and drugging beyond any bounds of self-restraint. Praised for the sensitivity of his songwriting, Van Zant would throw punches without provocation (beating at least one woman in these pages) and once tried to toss a roadie from a plane—at 30,000 feet.
Serviceable but often floridly overwritten. Though Ribowsky accuses the band’s current incarnation and those who market the legacy of “mercenary profit motive,” the same charge could be leveled at the book.Pub Date: April 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-56976-146-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 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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