An affectionate, sharp-eyed memoir that, while it doesn't add anything groundbreaking to the rock-lit canon, will appeal to...
A visit to the magical, blood-spattered world of the Alice Cooper Group, courtesy of Dunaway, the band’s bassist, co-songwriter and “theatrical conceptionalist.”
Hard-rock fans of a certain generation think of Alice Cooper as the original shock rocker, a platinum-selling performance artist who took to the stage looking as if he stepped out of A Clockwork Orange, ranting and raving about billion-dollar babies and how school was out forever. Today, in comparison to the Marilyn Mansons of the world, Cooper's schtick seems almost quaint, but during his heydey, he was a frightening, formidable force in the rock world. A close friend from childhood on, Dunaway was with Cooper every step of the way, and he documents that story in this agreeable memoir. But does Cooper’s place in the rock world merit a memoir from his bassist, and is the bassist a good enough memoirist to overcome his own lack of notoriety? The answer to both questions is a qualified yes. Dunaway makes a solid case for Cooper’s place in the rock pantheon, continually pointing out not just the fact that he was an above-average singer, songwriter, and frontman, but also the role he played in incorporating theater into rock performance. To Dunaway’s credit, the book is more than just an homage to his old friend; it’s a love letter to an era. But it’s not all roses. Readers looking for the kind of lasciviousness they expect from an Alice Cooper confidant won’t be disappointed, as the author does plenty of sordid, albeit not-too-slimy dishing about the band’s backstage shenanigans. Dunaway has a terrific memory, which is both a positive and negative: though the book can get bogged down in minutiae, the author leaves no stone unturned.
An affectionate, sharp-eyed memoir that, while it doesn't add anything groundbreaking to the rock-lit canon, will appeal to Alice Cooper die-hards and fans of his brand of music.Pub Date: June 9, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-04808-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2015
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
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