For Beach Boys completists, essential. For die-hard fans of Love & Mercy, probably one to miss.
The Beach Boy everyone loves to hate speaks his piece—sometimes sweetly, often gruffly, but always candidly.
As has been the case for half a century, Love has axes to grind: Uncle Murry Wilson cut him out of lots of cash. “My dad fucked us,” says cousin Brian, who cut him out of lots of credit. And fans have cut him out of the ardor reserved for the three Wilson brothers—and even Al Jardine. The author tends to the blustery in this memoir, but he’s got claim to bragging rights; after all, as he’s quick to insist, he gave Paul McCartney the idea for the Beach Boys–ish chorus in “Back in the U.S.S.R.,” and he sprinkled the song “Good Vibrations” and the rest of the catalog with special magic. One can certainly appreciate why he might feel bitter, since suits and countersuits have been flying like surfboards atop the cresting waves for decades, but Love is not inclined to make nice even as he drifts toward his ninth decade, and he’s taking no prisoners. When he revisits embarrassing moments such as his notorious Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame induction speech, he’s generally convinced of his righteousness (“I didn’t have time to meditate that day,” he says of that unproud moment, “so I was even more on edge”). A few more efforts to soothe ruffled feathers and forgive trespasses would have taken the aggrieved, resentful edge off this book, but still, it’s good to hear the much-repeated story of the Beach Boys’ implosion from the point of view of the canonical villain of the piece. And you’ve got to admire his stamina: he gets up and goes to it each day, he says, because “the music is now part of our country’s DNA,” and go to it he does, hitting stages all over the world hundreds of times a year.
For Beach Boys completists, essential. For die-hard fans of Love & Mercy, probably one to miss.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-399-17641-8
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Blue Rider Press
Review Posted Online: July 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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