A perfunctory accounting that reads like a stretched-out Sunday supplement article.
Routine assessment of Kurt Cobain’s cultural influence.
Editor of the now-defunct Seattle music magazine The Rocket at the height of the city’s music scene in the 1990s, Cross (Led Zeppelin: Shadows Taller than Our Souls, 2009, etc.) has written several biographies of local heroes, including the best-selling and critically acclaimed Cobain life story Heavier than Heaven (2001). In this slim book, the author sets out to make the case for six areas in which Cobain’s influence was most strongly felt: music (primarily rock, not surprisingly, but also hip-hop); popular culture and media; fashion; the cities of Seattle and Aberdeen, Wash. (the depressed community where Cobain was born and raised); the ways addiction and suicide are prevented or treated; and his legacy among family and peers. The divisions among these areas are not always sharp, and in many cases cited by the author, Cobain can’t be credited solely or even primarily. For instance, though the phenomenon called grunge takes up a major part of Cross’ attention, he admits that Cobain never considered himself part of that alleged movement, the name of which was popularized by Mark Arm of the Seattle band Mr. Epp and the Calculations. Also, was it Cobain or Nirvana as a whole that was responsible for practically inventing the category of alternative rock for record stores and radio stations? It was, however, undoubtedly Cobain who, with his dirt-poor taste in thrift-shop cardigans, Army surplus plaids and generic ripped jeans, influenced a whole generation of fashionistas like Marc Jacobs and Hedi Slimane. Every so often, fashion resets with a new grunge period of anti-style, and Cross convincingly argues that we have Cobain and his widow, Courtney Love, to thank for that.
A perfunctory accounting that reads like a stretched-out Sunday supplement article.Pub Date: March 18, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-230821-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: It Books/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2014
IN THE NEWS
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.
