Following several attempts at a reunion, the band died with Van Zant and three other band members in a plane crash in 1977,...
One for the fans as Odom, security manager for Lynyrd Skynyrd and longtime buddy of lead man Ronnie Van Zant, chronicles the boozy ascent and abrupt crash of the hugely popular band.
They certainly burned bright for a few years, with a “hellfire boogie played at a quickfire pace.” In this admiring biography, Odom follows the band through its early manifestations as the Noble Five and the One Percent, playing gigs off the back of a flatbed truck at church socials while adding and subtracting members. This was a bunch of gents who liked fishing, fighting, girls, and singing: rednecks and proud of it. But, Odom says, they—and Van Zant in particular—were perfectionists, rehearsing and noodling with their songs until they ultimately attracted the attention of Al Kooper, who further helped shape their sound. Sketches are afforded of each of the band members and a good number of their entourage, but it’s Van Zant who commands Odom’s affection. A talented songwriter who made the most of his limited vocal skills, Van Zant was a Jekyll-and-Hyde drinker, unpredictably violent when drunk (and drunk most of the time, as were most of the band members). Yet, despite all the drinking before the shows, the band had enormous stage presence, and their neatly choreographed performances crackled with energy. Odom bravely tries to make a case for their distinctiveness within Southern rock (including the Allman Brothers, ZZ Top, Marshall Tucker), but it was their knack for “quotation music”—carefully measured appropriations of Hendrix, Clapton, Jethro Tull, and others the band respected—that steams off the page here, second only to their gift for hellraising.
Following several attempts at a reunion, the band died with Van Zant and three other band members in a plane crash in 1977, an accident handled with tact here and easily the most disturbing and electrifying part of this tribute to Lynyrd Skynyrd. (Photographs)Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2002
ISBN: 0-7679-1026-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2002
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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