Beastie Boys fans will devour this book, as will anyone interested in the early days of hip-hop, the art/music/street life...
A lively and accessible account of the Beasties’ decadeslong career, told by the Boys themselves and a coterie of friends and admirers.
The long-awaited first book from co-authors and fellow Beastie Boys Diamond and Horovitz is a fan’s dream. The narrative details the group’s meteoric rise to fame, from their humble beginnings in the New York hardcore scene of the early 1980s, to their first tours (opening for the likes of Madonna and Run-DMC), and on through the many permutations of their music and persona as they held on to their position as standard-bearers in the worlds of music, fashion, and pop culture throughout the ’80s, ’90s, and 2000s. Diamond and Horovitz each wrote roughly half of the chapters, and their respective personalities shine through in their writing styles; they play off each other the way comedy teams do, much as they did when they were on the mic. These chapters alternate with insightful essays from heavy hitters like Luc Sante, Jonathan Lethem, and others as well as goofy rap album–style interludes—e.g., a comprehensive review of all of their music videos by comedienne Amy Poehler. The book is often laugh-out-loud funny, especially when Horovitz narrates, and Diamond’s comparatively dry sense of humor makes him the perfect foil. The fact that third Beastie Adam Yauch (1964-2012) wasn’t around to contribute lends the book an elegiac tone that bubbles just under the surface of the narrative. Superfans may long for more details from the later years of the group's career; the amount of space devoted to the band’s formative years is huge. There are, however, song-by-song details for all of their records, which will delight the faithful, and the aforementioned “interludes” fill out the overall picture quite well.
Beastie Boys fans will devour this book, as will anyone interested in the early days of hip-hop, the art/music/street life of New York City in the 1980s, and the alternative-nation zeitgeist of the ’90s.Pub Date: Oct. 30, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9554-1
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
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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