A gauzy, PG-13 love letter from NKOTB to the throngs of faithful women responsible for making their rock-star dreams come...
The story of how five boys from Boston rose from nothing to become unlikely international recording stars in the late 1980s—and the more interesting story of the legion of devoted “Blockheads” that has sustained them ever since.
None of the largely nondescript personalities (save perhaps the gregarious Donnie Wahlberg) that comprise the New Kids on the Block is revealed to any significant degree in Van Noy’s (So Much to Say: Dave Matthews Band—20 Years on the Road, 2011) otherwise readable band biography. But that clearly is not the point. Instead, the author is more concerned with illustrating the truly fascinating (bewildering?) bond that has seemingly been magically forged between NKOTB and their female fans—aka “Blockheads.” The author quotes random fans extensively, and she dutifully chronicles the group’s humble beginnings on the streets of Boston to their jet-setting zenith conquering the pop world. Despite the general banality of Jordan, Jon, Joe, Donnie and Danny, there is true profundity in the stories of accomplished adult women who, during their formative years, fell in love with five flickering images on TV screens and never let go. Van Noy maintains the gossamer veneer throughout, collecting the band’s dirty laundry and tidily stowing it far out of sight. The author quickly skates over many of the intragroup conflicts – including hot-button issues like NKOTB’s decision to part ways with original producer Maurice Starr, Joey McIntyre’s gripes about his perennial outsider status and Jon Knight’s surprising sexuality. Even though the NKOTB/Blockhead romance burned as hot as a neutron star inside teenage girls’ hearts, you’d never know it by the way Van Noy manages to keep everything so chaste.
A gauzy, PG-13 love letter from NKOTB to the throngs of faithful women responsible for making their rock-star dreams come true.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-6785-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2012
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
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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