An upbeat study in musical growth and stardom, though it’s lacking in writerly style or Smiths gossip.
The driving force behind the Smiths recalls his path to stardom and what he wore along the way.
The thing that makes Marr’s autobiography of interest also stands in the way of making it interesting: he was all of 23 when his iconic band called it quits in 1987, and being a wunderkind doesn’t mean he has much interior insight to deliver, either about himself or others. (His perspective on the Smith’s charismatic frontman, Morrissey, extends little beyond admiration for his interview skills and befuddlement at their falling out.) Born into working-class Irish stock in Manchester, Marr developed twin obsessions with music and fashion in the late 1970s and early ’80s; he notes exactly what he wore for the Smiths’ first press photo and details some early hairstyle experiments. Unfortunately, many of the author’s descriptions are flat-footed. So many of his experiences were “perfect”: The Smiths’ debut single, “Hand in Glove,” his acquisition of a Rickenbacker guitar, the church where he married his wife, the lyrics to “There Is a Light that Never Goes Out.” To Marr’s credit, however, there’s little fat on the pages: he details the band’s legal and drug issues, as well as an eye-opening car crash, with sleek efficiency. The final third of the book, which catalogs his post-Smiths family and musical life, is surprisingly lively. Marr has a few good anecdotes to share about stints with the Talking Heads, Paul McCartney, the Pretenders, The The, and Modest Mouse, as well as his getting clean and healthy. (Once, in the early 2000s, he ran five marathons in a week.) Recalling a meeting with the Dalai Lama, Marr smirks that “he didn’t ask me if the Smiths were going to re-form,” a telling joke from an artist eager to put his past behind him but charged with writing a book about it.
An upbeat study in musical growth and stardom, though it’s lacking in writerly style or Smiths gossip.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-243869-0
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2016
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
