An interesting duet that details precisely how women truly rock.
Shared memoir by the Wilson sisters, driving forces behind the band Heart and pioneers of the hard-rock scene for countless female musicians.
"We never took up that cause on purpose—it was accidental, or at best the fate we were born to," writes Wilson. "We were naive, young, and unwilling to believe that we couldn't do something just because we were females." The sisters were part of a very musical family. Both parents were accomplished musicians who always had opera, jazz, folk or country music playing. The family, including older sister Lisa, would sing together on road trips. Ann received a guitar while home sick from school for several weeks, but it was Nancy, four years younger, who took to it. When they saw the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show, the sisters knew they wanted to be rock stars. As teenagers, Ann and Nancy performed together for family, friends and eventually small crowds. They were hooked. Since the 1970s, Heart has had top-10 hits in four different decades and sold more than 35 million records. With the help of Cross (Led Zeppelin: Shadows Taller Than Our Souls, 2009, etc.), the sisters take turns describing the highs and lows of being females in a male-dominated world, the loves that led them to write "Magic Man" and "Barracuda," the joys of motherhood and partying with rock legends. "When I first auditioned for Heart and sat in with my sister's band back in those Vancouver cabarets, I never imagined that I was signing up for a life under the microscope," writes Nancy Wilson. "Seeing my personal failures highlighted in the press was a price of fame, but it was a steep cost.”
An interesting duet that details precisely how women truly rock.Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-06-210167-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: It Books/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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