Extremely technical and sure to alienate non-geeks, but nonetheless an illuminating chronicle.
The Fab Four’s sound engineer, present from their first single to their final album, tells all about sharing studio time with the biggest rock band in history.
Raised in North London, Emerick became enamored with recorded music as a tot, and with recording it as a teen. A combination of luck and persistence led to his first job, at age 16, at EMI Studios (later renamed Abbey Road), where he spent the next few decades. Within a month, he witnessed the first recording session of a quartet of scruffy Liverpudlians; just three years later, he was thrown into the fire as their sound engineer, working under the legendary “Fifth Beatle,” producer George Martin. Decades of all-night recording sessions, simultaneously invigorating and frustrating, followed, and album upon album of innovative, groundbreaking pop classics were recorded, peaking with the universally adored Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and falling to a painful nadir with the spotty Abbey Road. The author writes little of his personal life outside the studio, as he seemed to live and breathe his work. In the end, the reader knows the Beatles about as well as Emerick did—that is, not all that well, as he repeatedly admits. Admirably evenhanded, Emerick makes no secret of his affinity for Paul, whom he characterizes as polite and good-natured, but remains diplomatic when discussing each Beatle (and even Yoko). This British politeness at times works against the book, which can be dry. Overall, however, Emerick provides an informative introduction to the creative process of the 20th century’s most influential rock musicians.
Extremely technical and sure to alienate non-geeks, but nonetheless an illuminating chronicle.Pub Date: April 1, 2006
ISBN: 1-592-40179-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gotham Books
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2006
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
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