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GOLD DUST WOMAN

A BIOGRAPHY OF STEVIE NICKS

An entertaining rock biography, even if you’re a take-it-or-leave-it fan of the singer.

An unauthorized biography of Stevie Nicks (b. 1948), best known as the lead singer for Fleetwood Mac.

Rock biographer Davis (More Room in a Broken Heart: The True Adventures of Carly Simon, 2012, etc.) begins with his subject’s Welsh ancestry, taking it as a window into the mystical element in many of her songs. Nicks was born in Phoenix but spent much of her youth in California. Music was in her family, with a grandfather who sang country songs in bars and took her along to sing harmony when she was still very young. In high school, she learned guitar and started writing folk songs. Meeting another young guitarist, Lindsey Buckingham, put Nicks on the road to a musical career, though she spent several years waiting tables and hoping for breaks while they scuffled. When Mick Fleetwood came looking for a replacement lead guitarist, the engineer suggested Buckingham. He brought along Nicks, and with the new additions, Fleetwood Mac went from being reliable second-stringers to the hottest group on the planet. Davis gives readers a look into recording sessions and concert tours, playing up the personality clashes and shifting romantic entanglements that made up the mystique of Fleetwood Mac in its heyday. Given the “unauthorized” character of the book, Nicks’ impressions and feelings are more or less secondhand, quoted from interviews by others or guessed at by band mates and friends. This is less a problem than it might be, since Nicks has been fairly open, at least since the early days when the band kept her under wraps. As usual, the author is good at keeping readers—even those not totally enthralled by Nicks’ music—turning pages. Things get slower when Davis recounts her solo career, though there were frequent reunions and continued drama between her and her band mates, especially Buckingham—and, of course, the drug problems and other personal crises that come with being a rock star.

An entertaining rock biography, even if you’re a take-it-or-leave-it fan of the singer.

Pub Date: Nov. 21, 2017

ISBN: 978-1-250-03289-8

Page Count: 352

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2017

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

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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