The sad trajectory of Elvis Presley's life is a familiar story, but this memoir does shed a little new light on the early years. Though Moore is a distinguished guitar innovator and recording engineer, any general interest in his career lies in the 14 years he spent touring with Elvis. It all began back in Memphis in 1954, when Scotty and bassist Bill Black were casting around for a singer to front their unnamed band. A friend introduced them to the teenage Elvis, then unknown. They rehearsed a few times, then recorded more rehearsals at Sun Studios. These sessions produced a single with ``That's All Right, Mama'' on the A-side, ``Blue Moon of Kentucky'' on the B, and the rest is history. Moore and Black crisscrossed the South, touring with Elvis, but as his popularity soared, they were increasingly reduced to mere sidemen. Elvis promised them a percentage of record royalties, then broke his word. Moore and Black were left with salaries so meager they often couldn't cover living expenses. (Over the 14 years Scotty intermittently played with Elvis, he earned less than $31,000.) Eventually, they parted company. Disillusioned, Moore largely gave up the guitar and threw himself into studio work, mainly engineering. Musicologists may debate how revolutionary Elvis's early music really was, but a substantial component of that sound was Scotty's innovative (and self-taught) guitar stylings: ``His idea of using his guitar to provide counterpoint to the vocalist was a radical concept in popular recording at that time,'' asserts Dickerson. ``Scotty,'' a Nashville producer notes, ``was the whole deal. He made it all work.'' Though Dickerson (Goin' Back to Memphis, not reviewed) is not quite such an innovative collaborator, he turns in a competent performance with the slender material at hand. Scotty's real monument is not this book, but his music. (65 b&w illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-02-864599-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1997
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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