The unbilled drummer in the supergroup Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young tells an unsatisfying and not always credible story of drugs and sex (and a little rock 'n' roll). Taylor, a millionaire at age 21 who spiraled down and down, writes his chapters in flashback scenes from two different vantage points: a hospital, where he undergoes a liver-transplant operation (funded in part by a benefit concert given by his musician buddies) and addiction-treatment sessions. But neither the intensive-care unit nor group therapy justifies Taylor's extensive and bad re- creations of dialogue, like the speech about the '60s that he delivers while in the hospital: ``I swallowed the whole `dawn of a new day, it's a new world' bullshit hook, line and sinker.'' His story includes some luridly interesting tales: nearly having an orgy with Jimi Hendrix (Taylor turned tail and ran when Hendrix greeted him at the door in the nude); wife-swapping with the Rolling Stones' Bill Wyman; and drug excesses with his band mates, with teenagers he met at Woodstock, and with a hitchhiker while driving 140 mph. However, he skimps on describing his musical career and his current life. Taylor now works as a substance-abuse counselor in California and has reconstructed his life with a new wife who didn't shrink from ``an ex-junkie, a thrice-divorced, has- been musician with a police record, no high school diploma and one grandchild.'' Former band mate David Crosby, in an introduction, sees Taylor as someone caught by all the ``peripheral traps'' of the music business. A worthy cautionary tale, however, doesn't necessarily make a good book. (16 pages of b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: July 15, 1994
ISBN: 1-56025-072-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1994
Elegant essays marked by surprising shifts and unexpected connections.
Largely autobiographical meditations and wanderings through landscapes external and internal.
National Book Critics Circle Award–winner Solnit (River of Shadows: Edward Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, 2003, etc.) roams through a large territory here. The book cries out for an explanatory subtitle: “field guide” shouldn’t be taken as a literal description of these eclectic memories, keen observations and provocative musings. Four of Solnit’s essays have the same title, “The Blue of Distance,” but the first segues from the blue in Renaissance paintings to a turquoise blouse the author wore as a child, then to the blue of distance seen on a walk across the drought-shrunken Great Salt Lake. The second presents Cabeza de Vaca, a Spanish explorer who wandered for years in the Americas, and then several white children taken captive by Indians; their stories demonstrate that a person can cease to be lost not only by returning, but also by turning into someone else. The third blue essay explores the world of country and western music, full of tales of loss and longing. The fourth introduces the eccentric artist Yves Klein, who patented the formula for his special electric blue paint and claimed to be launching a new Blue Age. How does it all fit in? Don’t ask, just enjoy, for Solnit is a captivating writer. Woven in and out of these four pieces and the five others that alternate with them are Solnit’s immigrant ancestors, lost friends, former lovers, favorite old movies, her own dreams, the house she grew up in, harsh deserts, animals on the edge of extinction and abandoned buildings. All become material for the author’s explorations of loss, losing and being lost.
Elegant essays marked by surprising shifts and unexpected connections.Pub Date: July 11, 2005
ISBN: 0-670-03421-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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