Weakest on musical recollections and career arcs, but some overwhelmingly poignant and wrenching personal meditations make...
The celebrated rock guitarist pens an uneven yet engrossing memoir.
Clapton has enjoyed a colorful and eventful career for four decades, and he has long been among the most reticent of interview subjects, so the English axeman’s autobiography is cause for some celebration. The book will aggravate those who want to know more about the nuts and bolts of his long-lasting stardom, though he dutifully, if somewhat perfunctorily, marches through his musical history. Born illegitimate in rural Surrey and raised by his grandparents, Clapton became a blues fanatic and took up guitar as a youth. Barely in his 20s, he found immediate fame as a wizardly soloist in a succession of storied bands: the Yardbirds, John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, Cream, Blind Faith and Derek & The Dominos. The ever-hesitant Clapton still appears uneasy about delving too deeply into the dynamics of these legendary groups, though here and there he offers an amusing backstage anecdote or a penetrating glimpse of such bandmates as drummer Ginger Baker and keyboardist Steve Winwood, or contemporaries like Jimi Hendrix and John Lennon. His tale is most compelling, and his narrative voice strongest, when he writes about the vicissitudes of his romantic life and his protracted struggle with heroin addiction and alcoholism. He emotionally replays his agonizing affair and long, rocky relationship with Pattie Boyd, George Harrison’s wife when he met her, and he is bluntly honest about the years he lost to junk and drink before he finally sobered up for good 20 years ago. Clapton is also movingly candid about the accidental death of his son Conor in 1991. His account of the founding of his Antiguan drug-and-alcohol facility Crossroads powerfully affirms the guitarist’s commitment to recovery. The book peters out in its last pages, as Clapton muses on marital commitment and late-life parenthood.
Weakest on musical recollections and career arcs, but some overwhelmingly poignant and wrenching personal meditations make the book a success.Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-385-51851-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2007
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
