You might think this is a perfect match between author and subject—and you’d be right.
A comprehensive look at the New Wave band from Boston that charmed the world.
The 1980s had more than its share of one-hit wonders and bands now lost to obscurity, but the Cars have endured—“You Might Think,” “Drive,” and more are still radio and playlist staples. As Janovitz points out in his biography of the band, “It’s hard to imagine American popular music without them.” The group was a product of the friendship between Ric Ocasek and Ben Orr, who met in Columbus, Ohio, in 1968; the two moved to Boston and played in bands together before forming the Cars with Elliot Easton, Greg Hawkes, and David Robinson in 1976. The band’s rapid ascent began when Boston DJ Maxanne Sartori played “Just What I Needed” on her radio station, WBCN, which led to the band getting a record deal. A decade of highs and lows would follow, including four Top 10 hit singles and countless fights between Ocasek and his colleagues; Janovitz does a remarkably thorough job chronicling them on the basis of his interviews with the band’s three surviving members (Orr died in 2000, Ocasek in 2019) and those who knew the band. Much of the book necessarily centers on Ocasek, a complex and maddening figure: He could be sweet and charming, but he routinely belittled and ignored his bandmates, abandoned friends, and left his second wife for Paulina Porizkova, a model 21 years his junior. Janovitz dives deeply into the other members, however, and is careful not to paint Ocasek as a monster. His writing about the band’s music is wonderful—he is himself a Boston-area musician, the singer-songwriter for Buffalo Tom, and brings ample context to the Cars’ oeuvre. This is a superb rock biography, a must for anyone with even a passing interest in pop music.
You might think this is a perfect match between author and subject—and you’d be right.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2025
ISBN: 9780306835063
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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