An adequate resource for hardcore DMB fans content to have their sycophantic reverence for the band repeatedly reinforced.
Light, fan-friendly look at one of today’s most successful American touring bands.
It’s tough to tell whether journalist and first-time author Van Noy’s book on the Dave Matthews Band is more about the band’s impact on its fans or the fans’ impact on the band. Whatever the case, this portrait of the Charlottesville, Va., band’s unlikely rise to fame reads like a 200-page press release. The book relies heavily on interviews with DMB fanatics who unconditionally praise the band. Van Noy’s writing resembles the sort of depthless amateurism you’d expect from a college newspaper and not from a professional writer. The author seems incredibly protective of her subject and never allows for much behind-the-scenes access to the band members or to their music. Much of the research consists of statistics and figures that reflect the band’s consummate popular success. The author provides tons of data on how much money the band makes on tour, how many records they sell, how many seats the venues they play hold and even how many gallons of bio-diesel fuel they burn in a year. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with writing a one-sided book from a fan’s perspective, but Van Noy is positive to a fault.
An adequate resource for hardcore DMB fans content to have their sycophantic reverence for the band repeatedly reinforced.Pub Date: June 7, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4391-8273-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2011
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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