Heavy on style, light on revelation.
Walker (Laurel Canyon, 2006) argues convincingly that rock experienced significant change in the early 1970s among artists, audience and industry alike.
It's regrettable, then, that some quality writing and incisive analysis is undermined by the author’s peculiar focus on three bands and one year. Readers may well wonder why a book that takes its title from a 1975 David Bowie hit (“Fame”) is instead about Led Zeppelin, the Who and Alice Cooper in 1973. That year, all three launched massive tours the author sees as fraught with epochal impact, the likes of which “the world has not seen since and probably never will again.” Walker has a weakness for such grandiose pronouncements (he also bids us, “Welcome to 1973—the year the sixties die”); fortunately, he's usually a smart observer and reporter. Because so much has already been written about the other two groups, Alice Cooper initially seems to be the odd band out, but it's the one to which the author apparently had the most access and certainly does the best job of putting in fresh perspective, as originators of a style of theatrical showmanship that would leave an imprint on rock tours to come. In the early ’70s, peace and love gave way to harder drugs and more outrageous debauchery; the audience got younger, the bands richer and the business more cutthroat. Rock became a different animal, and Walker does an often provocative, never-less-than-serviceable job of showing how and why. He vividly captures the frustrations of the Who, the excesses of Led Zeppelin and the jealousies within Alice Cooper. It should also be noted, however, that he draws heavily on what has long been known and already written, and his odd decision to slip into the present tense for extended stretches does not improve the narrative's coherence.
Heavy on style, light on revelation.Pub Date: July 23, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9288-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2013
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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