A tour of the contemporary pop music industry with one of America's most promising new bands, whose three members happen to be women. A nail-spitting punk trio of potential long-term influence that reserves the right to be both attractive and assertive, Babes in Toyland is one of the first all-female rock groups to earn widespread renown. Former Rolling Stone editor Karlen documents the Babes' pursuit of both fame and punk rigor; their long nights on the road; their difficulties with record execs, hangers-on, and one another. He also peeks into the world of enigmatic A&R man Tim Carr, who brought the Babes to Warner Music, then struggled to win them attention with a minuscule ad budget in a climate in which MTV's Beavis and Butt-head are the ultimate arbiters of cool. Karlen is sometimes more interested in his subjects' reputation than in their talent, so the content of their music gets scant attention; almost no lyrics are offered, despite the author's assertion that lead singer Kat Bjelland is a poet. But he's lucky- -the three Babes are intriguing women: Lori Barbero, the first female drummer embraced by rock's mostly male establishment; the orphaned, waifish Bjelland, whose performances resemble primal therapy; and Michelle Leon, a brainy 19-year-old whose boyfriend's murder, recounted here, causes her to leave the band. All three (and Maureen Herman, Leon's replacement) are role models for a new generation of female musicians intent on making a place for women in rock 'n' roll. Karlen's hyper-rhetoric sometimes intrudes, but he isn't oblivious to the ironies in Warner's effort to sell the Babes without sacrificing their street credibility. Recommended for moms and dads whose daughters want to grow up to be rock musicians—and (of course) their rockin' daughters. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-8129-2058-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Times/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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