A smart, sober reappraisal of Janis Joplin’s whirlwind life and the hippie moment. Having interviewed scores of Joplin’s intimates, rock critic and historian Echols (Daring to Be Bad, not reviewed) persuades us that the received image of Joplin as a wild, doomed, drunken howler—memorialized in several previous biographies and in the movie The Rose—is wrong only in that it emphasizes Joplin’s iconic extremity of style at the expense of personal and cultural context. In the bleak refinery town of Port Arthur, Tex., Joplin was rejected by her high school and college peers for her ungainly looks and intellectual curiosity; she responded by developing a boisterous beatnik persona, drinking and listening to folk, jazz, and blues with other rebels. Joplin won praise singing at coffeehouses in Austin; made a few forays to San Francisco and New York, where she lived precariously and started taking speed and heroin; and finally, after an unsatisfying year-long attempt at conforming to bun-haired Port Arthur primness, moved again to San Francisco in 1966 as the acid-fueled counterculture was approaching full flower. Joplin joined and galvanized Big Brother and the Holding Company, one of the many semicompetent Haight-Ashbury bands devoted to meandering, out-of-tune jamming. Echols gives a thorough, bracingly unsentimental overview of the scene’s muddleheaded idealism and its rapid commodification and demise. Joplin shot to fame with her histrionic, gut- spilling performances, but mass adoration did not fill her “bottomless pit of neediness—: “No high could compete with her lows, with her conviction that she was worthless.” Her heroin addiction, alcoholism, and tumultuous sexual relationships (with both men and women) were all related to that insecurity, says Echols, but were by no means unique in the curdled post-1967 counterculture. What’s lacking here is Joplin’s music: while Echols’s is a convincing psychological and sociological portrait, we come away with little sense of the substance or quality of her records. (40 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: March 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-8050-5387-5
Page Count: 392
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1999
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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