Mildly inspirational, fairly clichéd and an extremely tough sell.
Guitarist from platinum-selling metal band gets trashed, has kid, gets born again, writes book.
Melding old-school thrash rock with a Red Hot Chili Peppers-ish, hip-hop-ish attitude, California-based quartet Korn was at the forefront of the 1990s nu-metal movement. They were a hard-partying band, and founding guitarist Brian “Head” Welch often indulged in the stereotypical sex-and-drugs lifestyle right alongside his enabling Korn-ers. Eventually he realized it was difficult to simultaneously spearhead group meth sessions and properly raise his daughter Jennea. On one of his rare days off in 2004, Welch heard his five-year-old happily crooning the Korn tune “A.D.I.D.A.S.” (an acronym for “all day I dream about sex”), which features such kid-friendly lyrics as, “Screwing may be the only way I can truly be free from my f***ed up reality.” It dawned on him that harsh music and harsher substance abuse might not be the best influence on his child. Much to the shock of his bandmates and their fans, he swore off drugs, walked away from Korn and abruptly became a born-again Christian. Welch is a decent, if unexceptional storyteller, and he has good source material to work with: What meathead metal band’s history doesn’t include multiple moments of debauchery? His proselytizing grows repetitive, however, so some may find his autobiography at once alienating and dull. More to the point, it’s schizophrenic—six chapters rock memoir, six chapters religious treatise. Only a small percentage of Korn’s fan base is likely be interested in reading about the guitarist’s spiritual awakening, and hardcore Christians are even less likely to want to read about a sideman from a band they’ve probably never heard of.
Mildly inspirational, fairly clichéd and an extremely tough sell.Pub Date: July 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-06-125184-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2007
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
