A worthwhile rock ’n’ roll memoir, and an inspiring story about following one’s bliss.
Rock ’n’ roll pioneer Bonds details his remarkable half-century career in popular music.
Gary U.S. Bonds—born Gary L. Anderson—was barely in his 20s when his performances of rollicking tunes like “New Orleans” (1960) and “Quarter to Three” (1961) allowed him to break into the upper echelons of rock ’n’ roll music. Just five years later, however, Bonds’ shooting star already began to fade. Despite widespread critical acclaim, the Norfolk, Va., resident would spend the next four decades trying to scrape by on the golden-oldies circuit, playing in hotel lounges and even shopping malls. But as this briskly-paced career retrospective demonstrates, he rarely dwelled on the negative, even when performing to largely empty ballrooms and reading starkly worded foreclosure notices. Bonds’ persistence and belief in his own talents paid off in the early 1980s when he defied industry expectations and reignited his career after meeting Bruce Springsteen. Together with the Boss’ E Street Band alums, Bonds appeared in front of sold-out crowds and started recording such hits as “This Little Girl” (1981). Sadly, this rejuvenation was short-lived, and Bonds was soon back to struggling to make ends meet. Undaunted, the distinctive singer picked up and continued on as before, buoyed by what had sustained him throughout his turbulent career—loyal friends and a loving family. Bonds wastes little energy sniping at Frank Guida, the late Legrand Records producer who helped give him his start in music and, according to the author, deprived him of many hard-earned dollars—an all-too-familiar story. However, this decades-spanning professional memoir contains strikingly little bitterness; instead, Bonds’ incredible devotion to music shines through. It took Bonds, now in his seventh decade, this long to write his story, but it just might signal another professional rebirth. He’s done it before.
A worthwhile rock ’n’ roll memoir, and an inspiring story about following one’s bliss.Pub Date: June 1, 2013
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 230
Publisher: Wheatley Press, LLC
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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