Extremely knowledgeable about the rock music scene, Norman tells Clapton’s story with verve and insight.
The renowned guitar superhero emerges as “supersurvivor” in this authoritative biography.
In the latest of his long list of accomplished rock biographies, novelist and playwright Norman (Paul McCartney: The Life, 2016, etc.) turns to Eric Clapton (b. 1945). The author concluded that Clapton’s own autobiography was the only “formidable deterrent” to writing one, but he felt it withheld “as much as it revealed.” Written with Clapton’s approval and access to family members and close friends, Norman’s fine biography, both objective and sympathetic, envisions Clapton as “one of the most thoroughly dissolute rockers of olden times” who became the “most thoroughly reformed.” His unmarried mother asked her mother, Rose, to adopt baby Eric, and he grew up believing her to be his mother. The music of Buddy Holly impressed him mightily, and Clapton was much taken by Holly’s Fender Stratocaster: “That’s the future. That’s what I want.” His doting grandmother bought him a basic guitar, and he practiced by listening to records. At the heart of the book is Clapton’s constant quest for the right band and the right guitars to get the right blues sound. After playing with fledging bands like the Roosters and Engineers, he got his big break with the Yardbirds, famous for their impromptu “rave-ups.” During this “CLAPTON IS GOD” (as a London graffito read) period, he got his famous nickname, “Slow-handclapton.” More bands followed, including John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, Cream, and Blind Faith. Clapton also changed girlfriends as often as he changed bands. Norman describes his subject as a notorious “womaniser on the scale of Mick Jagger, a sex addict before the term was invented.” George Harrison was Clapton’s best friend, but he seduced and later married Harrison’s wife, Pattie Boyd; Clapton wrote “Layla” for her. Norman discusses in detail Clapton’s yearslong, devastating addictions to heroin and alcohol and provides countless fascinating stories about his fellow rockers.
Extremely knowledgeable about the rock music scene, Norman tells Clapton’s story with verve and insight.Pub Date: Oct. 30, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-56043-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2018
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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