Lou Reed and Keith Richards biographer Bockris offers the first full-length portrait of —70s rock icon Patti Smith, a woman whose charismatic live shows and uncompromising music earned her the moniker “The High Priestess of Punk.” As a poet-turned-rock-critic-turned-musician, as a friend of Bob Dylan, best friend of photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, and as a lover of playwright/actor Sam Shepard and Basketball Diaries author Jim Carroll, Smith was in the hub of the vibrant New York arts scene throughout the —70s. Bockris concentrates heavily on that angle, slipping in famous names wherever possible and writing extensively about himself in the “Seventh Heaven” chapter, named after Smith’s first published collection of poetry, which Bockris and his then partner, Andrew Wylie, were responsible for bringing to the public. But then it’s also worth noting that Bockris obviously had no contact with Smith for this book. It’s interesting to note because Smith, since returning to the public eye in 1996 after a long absence, has not been reclusive. Smith’s lack of involvement with Bockris greatly diminishes the reader’s feeling of gaining access to her life. Even more importantly, one can’t help but think that if one truly wanted to learn about Smith, one would be better off picking up any one of the number of interviews she’s granted, or last year’s book The Complete Patti Smith, a collection of her lyrics, other writings, and photographs. There, in her complete works, music fans see how Smith, as a musician, has influenced acts from Nirvana to U2 to R.E.M. Also there, in her own words, is the strength she’s shown as a person, in overcoming the deaths of her husband, best friend (Mapplethorpe) and brother (Todd) in the span of a year. Smith is indeed a worthy subject for a biography. But she and her many fans deserve better than this sometimes sensationalistic, second-hand account of her life.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-684-82363-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1999
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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