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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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