A fun read for indie-rock fans.
A play-by-play history of how journalist and blogger Sellers developed his taste in music.
From his father’s Bob Dylan obsession, which drove him to despise the artist, to his own preoccupation with now-defunct indie group Guided By Voices (GBV), Sellers dispenses rock anecdotes with a light touch. The Michigan-born author, who started out listening to Journey, chronicles his musical milestones: first album bought, first concert attended, first rock pilgrimage. High-school days favoring U2 and New Order gave way to the collegiate discovery of Joy Division and the Smiths, and then it was on to Pavement and his New York writing life. It all led to Sellers’s interest in GBV and the band’s astoundingly prolific songwriter and frontman, Robert Pollard. After consuming every GBV song he could get his hands on, Sellers and a buddy got a chance to live out their rock-fan fantasy of hanging out, drinking heavily and even singing onstage with GBV. Just when the author thought he’d made a decent impression on Pollard, a misunderstanding threatened their tenuous connection and chucked his rock dream into the gutter. Sellers’s self-deprecating, music-obsessed memoir echoes the style of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, but he manages to maintain a distinctive voice: likable, smart and steeped in music trivia, without being condescending.
A fun read for indie-rock fans.Pub Date: March 1, 2007
ISBN: 0-7432-7708-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
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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