A celebration of music made in the spirit of friendship rather than careerism.
Conservative West Texas spawns radical creativity and lifelong bonds of friendship in this story of an unlikely band.
Even readers who are music fans may know little about the Flatlanders, though devotees for whom “the Flatlanders’ songs were the Rosetta Stone of West Texas music” will likely know the story well. More than 40 years ago, three boyhood friends and some fellow travelers journeyed from Lubbock to Nashville to cut an album, which was not released at the time. Subsequently, Joe Ely became a cult favorite as a honky-tonk rocker and dynamic live performer (championed by both Bruce Springsteen and the Clash), and his recordings of songs by Jimmie Dale Gilmore and Butch Hancock spawned music careers for those two former Flatlanders as well. They continued to remain close while pursuing divergent musical paths before reuniting to record and perform after the turn of the century. Veteran Texas journalist Davis (Austin City Limits, 1999) knows these musicians well, as well as the culture that spawned them, so it’s surprising that he relies so heavily on secondary sources, from which he quotes liberally without providing full information (referring to a magazine piece without the article’s title, author or year, for example, or naming the writer without the publication or year). Perhaps a tight deadline was a problem, for there is also plenty of repetition of information that wouldn’t have survived a more thorough edit. Yet the author remains a colorful wordsmith, describing the adventurous Hancock as someone who “keeps more irons in the fire than a blacksmith on Benzedrine,” and the principals themselves are great storytellers. Describing the Flatlanders’ circuitous route to some semblance of success, Gilmore says, “Joe used to say that none of us had a thimbleful of ambition. But between the three of us, we had a towering lack of ambition.”
A celebration of music made in the spirit of friendship rather than careerism.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-292-74554-4
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Univ. of Texas
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2014
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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