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BETTER TO BURN OUT

Name: BETTER TO BURN OUT
Author: Dave Thompson
ISBN: 1-56025-190-5

THE CULT OF DEATH IN ROCK 'N' ROLL

by Dave Thompson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 1999

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Thompson, a prominent music critic and author of Never Fade Away (not reviewed), an autopsy of Nirvana front man and suicide Kurt Cobain (and his phenomenon), returns again to the crypt to unearth dozens of sad, lurid, and occasionally cautionary tales. Rather than dwell primarily on the deaths of rock superstars, Thompson instead probes the ends of musicians either not well known or at least not big in America. The author covers nearly 40 years of rock ‘n’ roll fatalities, from the British promoter/producer, Joe Meek, who offed himself (but not before he took someone out with him), to T-Rex front man and faded teen idol Marc Bolan, who perished in a motor wreck, to the death from heart failure of Fred “Sonic” Smith, founder of the seminal proto-punk band MC5 and husband of punk goddess Patti Smith, to the drug-hastened demises of the Dead Boys/Lords of the New Church founder Stiv Bators and the Smashing Pumpkins’ keyboardist, Jonathan Melvoin. While many of the stories are told with baleful foreboding or chin-wagging melancholy, the author can’t seem to help but allow the more salacious elements to come bubbling up to the surface. Thus, for every tale of woe, such as Joy Division singer Ian Curtis’s failed bout with epilepsy, or the death from cancer of the French pop legend Jacques Brel, there are tales of the near-slapstick sign-offs of Sid Vicious and GG Allin, the pathetic story of the former Velvet Underground “chanteuse” and international glam gal Nico, or details of the sordid speculation that surrounded the suicide of INXS singer Michael Hutchence. What does this all add up to? A perfect antidote to the familiar parental catcall, “turn off that racket and pick up a book.” (50 photos, not seen)

Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1999

ISBN: 1-56025-190-5

Page Count: 288

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1999

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
LONDON’S BURNING
by Dave Thompson

- BOOK REVIEW
DEPECHE MODE
by Dave Thompson

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A LITTLE HISTORY OF POETRY

by John Carey ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2020

Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.

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A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.

In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.

Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.

Pub Date: April 21, 2020

ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Yale Univ.

Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
A REVOLUTION IN THREE ACTS
by David Hajdu ; illustrated by John Carey

- BOOK REVIEW
WILLIAM GOLDING
by John Carey

- BOOK REVIEW
THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE MASSES
by John Carey

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SLEEPERS

by Lorenzo Carcaterra ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 10, 1995

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An extraordinary true tale of torment, retribution, and loyalty that's irresistibly readable in spite of its intrusively melodramatic prose. Starting out with calculated, movie-ready anecdotes about his boyhood gang, Carcaterra's memoir takes a hairpin turn into horror and then changes tack once more to relate grippingly what must be one of the most outrageous confidence schemes ever perpetrated. Growing up in New York's Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s, former New York Daily News reporter Carcaterra (A Safe Place, 1993) had three close friends with whom he played stickball, bedeviled nuns, and ran errands for the neighborhood Mob boss. All this is recalled through a dripping mist of nostalgia; the streetcorner banter is as stilted and coy as a late Bowery Boys film. But a third of the way in, the story suddenly takes off: In 1967 the four friends seriously injured a man when they more or less unintentionally rolled a hot-dog cart down the steps of a subway entrance. The boys, aged 11 to 14, were packed off to an upstate New York reformatory so brutal it makes Sing Sing sound like Sunnybrook Farm. The guards continually raped and beat them, at one point tossing all of them into solitary confinement, where rats gnawed at their wounds and the menu consisted of oatmeal soaked in urine. Two of Carcaterra's friends were dehumanized by their year upstate, eventually becoming prominent gangsters. In 1980, they happened upon the former guard who had been their principal torturer and shot him dead. The book's stunning denouement concerns the successful plot devised by the author and his third friend, now a Manhattan assistant DA, to free the two killers and to exact revenge against the remaining ex-guards who had scarred their lives so irrevocably. Carcaterra has run a moral and emotional gauntlet, and the resulting book, despite its flaws, is disturbing and hard to forget. (Film rights to Propaganda; author tour)