For Deadheads, sure, but also rock fans who may wonder where the road led after Jerry died.
What happened after the long, strange trip ended—and then continued.
When Jerry Garcia, the legendary guitarist and de facto frontman of the Grateful Dead, died in 1995, the surviving band members chose to dissolve the band that had toured since 1965. Deadheads the world over were despondent, but it didn’t take long for the “Core Four”—bassist Phil Lesh, rhythm guitar player Bob Weir, and drummers Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart—to resume playing in various configurations. In his latest book, San Francisco Chronicle pop music journalist Selvin (Altamont: The Rolling Stones, the Hells Angels, and the Inside Story of Rock's Darkest Day, 2016, etc.) digs into the ups and downs of the 20 years following Garcia’s death. Die-hard fans will know most of the stories, but the author does a credible job navigating the countless permutations (RatDog, Further, the Other Ones, Phil and Friends, The Dead) and the revolving door of musicians (Warren Haynes, Bruce Hornsby, Steve Kimock, Trey Anastasio, among others) who played with the remaining members from 1995 through the momentous Fare Thee Well 50th anniversary shows in 2015. Those shows set a record for a concert by a single band, bringing in more than $50 million, demonstrating the remarkable staying power of the Grateful Dead. Though Selvin is “no Deadhead,” he has seen his fair share of shows, and his job at the Chronicle brought him into contact with the members numerous times across the decades. He has also done his homework, interviewing all of the major—and many minor—players involved in the band’s history. Much of the narrative is a litany of endless bickering among the surviving members, rocky terrain that the author handles capably, albeit in workmanlike prose. The book lacks the grace of a Greil Marcus, but the pages turn quickly enough to engage readers intrigued by the Dead’s mystique.
For Deadheads, sure, but also rock fans who may wonder where the road led after Jerry died.Pub Date: June 19, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-306-90305-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: May 7, 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 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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