Well-executed, but for hardcore Bowie fans only.
Exhaustive survey of David Bowie and his music.
Recent years have seen the publication of a variety of Bowie books, most notably the lengthy, impressive biographies by Marc Spitz (Bowie: A Biography, 2009) and Paul Trynka (David Bowie: Starman, 2011). Bowie is an unquestionably influential artist. However, considering all the detailed Bowie-centric material available, what else do we need to know about him? According to Doggett (You Never Give Me Your Money: The Beatles After the Breakup, 2010, etc.), too much Bowie information isn't enough. The author so reveres his subject that he decided to dissect each lyric and every note played by the Thin White Duke. The result is as comprehensive, and exhausting, as one might expect from a 450-page examination of a prolific artist's entire recorded output. This isn't to say that Doggett isn't a competent analyst. In fact, there aren’t many writers who have the combination of classic-rock knowledge, reverence for an artist and sheer patience to successfully pull off this sort of project. Doggett clearly conducted massive amounts of research on his subject, offering both historical context for Bowie's albums and the genesis of nearly every tune, and he’s undyingly passionate about his subject, proudly trumpeting the hits and coolly dissing the misses. For those Bowie-heads who didn't get what they needed from Spitz and Trynka, there are plenty of biographical tidbits sprinkled throughout the book. However, Doggett’s book will have a limited audience.
Well-executed, but for hardcore Bowie fans only.Pub Date: July 31, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-06-202465-7
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
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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