No matter how sleazy you might have heard the music industry is, this memoir suggests that it was worse.
The music industry is long overdue for its #MeToo explosion, and this memoir seems ready to light the fuse.
As the first female executive for Atlantic Records in A&R—artists and repertoire, the talent scouts who sign the recording acts—Carvello describes in dirty detail a “culture of toxic masculinity” that pervaded the company in particular and the industry as a whole. She was initiated into the industry as an assistant and secretary to the legendary Ahmet Ertegun, who hired her as something of a political favor, though she didn’t really know how to type or take dictation. Though the label’s founder enjoyed a reputation as something of a cosmopolitan sophisticate, she exposes him as “the guy who played with himself under his desk while dictating letters to his secretary” and “who verbally, physically, and sexually mistreated me.” Yet he was also her lifelong mentor, and she claims that she revered him even as he disgusted her—even after his violence toward her resulted in “a hairline fracture in my forearm.” By today’s standards, Ertegun would have been found guilty of sexual harassment and criminal assault, yet at the time, a lawyer told her “that if I sued for harassment, I’d lose my job. Worse than that, I knew I’d be blackballed from the entire business.” So Carvello went along to get along, swearing as much as the man-eating sharks that surrounded her, sleeping with some of them, and marrying one who physically abused her (and to whom she gave a black eye). She dishes unsavory details about industry giants such as Doug Morris, Irving Azoff, and Tommy Mottola (though not with the sexual accusations she levels at Ertegun), and she shows how she suffered from a reputation as “a troublemaker.” Yet her own attempts at revenge and her mixing of business with sexual pleasure suggest that she was willing to play the game by the same rules as the rest of them.
No matter how sleazy you might have heard the music industry is, this memoir suggests that it was worse.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-912777-91-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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