This close look at one of the ultimate guitar gods should find plenty of readers interested in 1960s and ’70s rock.
A full-length biography of Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page (b. 1944), whose reclusive habits have only added to his mythic status.
London-based music journalist Salewicz (Dead Gods: The 27 Club, 2015, etc.), who has interviewed his subject many times over the decades, chronicles Page’s rise from working-class London roots. Like many of his generation, Page went to art school on the way to finding a musical career. Inspired by American rockabilly records, Page became proficient enough at a young age to find work as a studio guitarist, making good money backing up popular acts. As the British blues revival flowered, he became the lead guitar player for the Yardbirds, following Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck. When that group broke up, Page formed Zeppelin, mapping out the band’s path with iron control. Salewicz follows the group through recording sessions and world tours—Zeppelin was especially popular in the United States—with attention to the band’s excesses, which included destruction of hotels along with other violent outbursts, heavy use of drugs and alcohol, and sexual encounters of all sorts. The author also devotes considerable attention to Page’s mystical side, especially his fascination with Aleister Crowley, perhaps giving it more credence than it deserves. Salewicz delves into Page’s battle with drugs, especially heroin and cocaine, and includes copious reminiscences from groupies who linked up with Page over the years, along with plenty of quotes from interviews with the famously reticent musician and with others who were part of the scene. With the band’s dissolution, Page’s hermetic tendencies became more pronounced. Salewicz chronicles the solo projects, the reunions with singer Robert Plant, and the painstaking project of reissuing Zeppelin’s recorded legacy. Dedicated listeners may want more analytical explorations of the music, and, like many rock journalists, the author tosses around superlatives with a free hand. Still, the book is a must-read for die-hard Zeppelin fans.
This close look at one of the ultimate guitar gods should find plenty of readers interested in 1960s and ’70s rock.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-306-84538-3
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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