A peek into the psyche of one of rock’s most inscrutable figures through the books that had the strongest impact on him.
In 2013, London’s Victoria & Albert Museum hosted an exhibition, “David Bowie Is,” for which the star drafted a list of the 100 books that had influenced him. O’Connell, a veteran music journalist, gamely delivers brief essays on each title, with context on what influence Bowie might have drawn from them. This is sometimes a tall order. Many of Bowie’s selections speak to his obvious passion for music, especially early rock ’n’ roll and R&B (Greil Marcus, Gerri Hershey), his famous Japanophilia (Yukio Mishima, Tadanori Yokoo), and his stint in Germany (Alfred Döblin, Otto Friedrich). There are a few surprising anecdotes—e.g., Alberto Denti di Pirajno’s obscure 1956 memoir, A Grave for a Dolphin directly inspired Bowie’s classic song “Heroes.” But many of Bowie’s selections don’t lend themselves to such cause-and-effect treatment. The best O’Connell can make of Bowie’s affection for Frank Norris’ McTeague and William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying is that teeth feature prominently and Bowie had dental implants; he can only speculate that Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard appealed for its story of a giant in decline. That straining for meaning suggests that this project might better have been approached thematically rather than book by book. Exploring Bowie’s interest in transgressive literature by Hubert Selby, Mikhail Bulgakov, Jack Kerouac, and John Rechy needn’t require extensive plot summaries of each novel; numerous books on divided selves speak collectively to Bowie’s career-long shape-shifting (and his late schizophrenic half brother). Still, O’Connell’s approach does underscore the range and playfulness in Bowie’s reading, from hefty tomes on the Russian Revolution to laddish comic books like The Beano.
An enlightening if imperfectly conceived look at Bowie’s eclectic bookshelf.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-982112-54-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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BOOK REVIEW
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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