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
A potent depiction of grief, but also a book lacking the originality and acerbic prose that distinguished Didion’s earlier...
A moving record of Didion’s effort to survive the death of her husband and the near-fatal illness of her only daughter.
In late December 2003, Didion (Where I Was From, 2003, etc.) saw her daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, hospitalized with a severe case of pneumonia, the lingering effects of which would threaten the young woman’s life for several months to come. As her daughter struggled in a New York ICU, Didion’s husband, John Gregory Dunne, suffered a massive heart attack and died on the night of December 30, 2003. For 40 years, Didion and Dunne shared their lives and work in a marriage of remarkable intimacy and endurance. In the wake of Dunne’s death, Didion found herself unable to accept her loss. By “magical thinking,” Didion refers to the ruses of self-deception through which the bereaved seek to shield themselves from grief—being unwilling, for example, to donate a dead husband’s clothes because of the tacit awareness that it would mean acknowledging his final departure. As a poignant and ultimately doomed effort to deny reality through fiction, that magical thinking has much in common with the delusions Didion has chronicled in her several previous collections of essays. But perhaps because it is a work of such intense personal emotion, this memoir lacks the mordant bite of her earlier work. In the classics Slouching Toward Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979), Didion linked her personal anxieties to her withering dissection of a misguided culture prey to its own self-gratifying fantasies. This latest work concentrates almost entirely on the author’s personal suffering and confusion—even her husband and daughter make but fleeting appearances—without connecting them to the larger public delusions that have been her special terrain.
A potent depiction of grief, but also a book lacking the originality and acerbic prose that distinguished Didion’s earlier writing.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4314-X
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
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SEEN & HEARD
A unique, incandescent memoir.
A lyrical, soul-stirring memoir about how an acclaimed Native American poet and musician came to embrace “the spirit of poetry.”
For Harjo, life did not begin at birth. She came into the world as an already-living spirit with the goal to release “the voices, songs, and stories” she carried with her from the “ancestor realm.” On Earth, she was the daughter of a half-Cherokee mother and a Creek father who made their home in Tulsa, Okla. Her father's alcoholism and volcanic temper eventually drove Harjo's mother and her children out of the family home. At first, the man who became the author’s stepfather “sang songs and smiled with his eyes,” but he soon revealed himself to be abusive and controlling. Harjo's primary way of escaping “the darkness that plagued the house and our family” was through drawing and music, two interests that allowed her to leave Oklahoma and pursue her high school education at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. Interaction with her classmates enlightened her to the fact that modern Native American culture and history had been shaped by “colonization and dehumanization.” An education and raised consciousness, however, did not spare Harjo from the hardships of teen pregnancy, poverty and a failed first marriage, but hard work and luck gained her admittance to the University of New Mexico, where she met a man whose “poetry opened one of the doors in my heart that had been closed since childhood.” But his hard-drinking ways wrecked their marriage and nearly destroyed Harjo. Faced with the choice of submitting to despair or becoming “crazy brave,” she found the courage to reclaim a lost spirituality as well as the “intricate and metaphorical language of my ancestors.”
A unique, incandescent memoir.Pub Date: July 9, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-393-07346-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2012
SEEN & HEARD
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