An engrossing cultural narrative, riddled with bombastic prose.
A detailed biography of the Rolling Stones, emphasizing musical minutiae and salacious recollections.
Davis (Jajouka Rolling Stone, 1993, etc.) leaves no “stone” unturned in this close examination of the Stones’ early-1960s formation and rapid dominance of rock culture, despite strife that would end the careers of most. Davis insists, sometimes pretentiously, that the confluence of events that brought together Brian Jones, Keith Richards, and Mick Jagger among postwar British blight represents a quasi-religious, signal cultural moment: “The Rolling Stones story does have a pantheistic mythos about it.” Davis acknowledges the crucial transformation of Missisippi Delta blues into the amplified urban variety played by Muddy Waters and Sonny Boy Williamson, which provoked a late-’50s European cognoscenti cult. It was on this early blues-worshipping circuit that the Rolling Stones formed, out of various cobbled-together R&B combos. Davis hones in on how their distinct personalities—Jones’s curiosity and sadism, Jagger’s raw sensuality and business acumen, and Richards’s dark appetites and assured playing—along with the talents of relatively “normal” drummer Charlie Watts and pianist Ian Stewart, formed a surprisingly adaptive rock-’n’-roll juggernaut. Between 1962 and 1966, they conquered “Swinging London,” and then became British teen sensations—somewhat incongruously, given their borrowed American R&B stylings. The Stones responded to 1960s turmoil with a remarkable series of albums and singles (Let It Bleed, etc.) that competed with Dylan, Hendrix, and the Beatles for rock primacy, despite a descent into debauchery that included Jones’s mysterious death, the murderous debacle of Altamont, Jagger’s participation in the doomed porn-art film Performance, and Richards’s alcoholism and heroin addiction. Yet the ’70s and ’80s saw the Stones become an increasingly profitable, corporate rock warhorse, their personal, legal, and tax difficulties notwithstanding. Davis skillfully recreates this brittle milieu of sleazy fame, in which figures like Andy Warhol, Gram Parsons, Chuck Berry, and Marianne Faithfull appear alongside the Hells Angels, underage groupies, and seemingly every hustler who ever nourished the band’s dark desires.
An engrossing cultural narrative, riddled with bombastic prose.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2001
ISBN: 0-7679-0312-9
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2001
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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