Of interest to aspiring or working DJs, but the mostly tepid stories won’t hold wide appeal.
An autobiography by a veteran female DJ in New York City.
After four decades on air, Miller still works as a DJ at Clear Channel's Q104.3 FM and Sirius/XM radio. In her debut book, she chronicles her entire life, beginning with her 1950s childhood in Fort Bragg, N.C., Brooklyn, N.Y., and suburban Nassau County, where she grew up in a somber household with Jewish parents whose lives had been "tainted by tragedy" stemming from World War II. Music-related memories include being riveted by Elvis's performance on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1956 and attending a Beatles concert in 1964. "The current music was just about my only source for the alien but evidently essential information about socializing,” she writes, “since such things were never spoken about at my house." Miller also discusses her college career at the University of Pennsylvania, where she started working in radio. Subsequently, she worked as a DJ in Philadelphia, and then New York, focusing on classic and progressive rock. An early fan of Bruce Springsteen, Miller describes meeting and/or interviewing celebrities such as Lily Tomlin, Paul and Linda McCartney and Murray Head, as well as briefly dating Steven Tyler. Darker chapters of her personal life include a long-running battle with breast cancer, which followed a doctor's misdiagnosis, a costly divorce and her struggle with uterine cancer. Throughout the book, Miller's voice remains upbeat and energetic, despite the shadow of her family's mysterious health issues. Her enthusiasm for rock ’n’ roll vividly colors her life, if not these pages.
Of interest to aspiring or working DJs, but the mostly tepid stories won’t hold wide appeal.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-06-184524-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2012
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
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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