Mildly entertaining but superficial and unremarkable.
One of the original video jockeys waxes nostalgic on her time with the MTV network.
Lisa Kennedy Montgomery was barely 20 when she began working for MTV during an era “when music mattered and time stopped” and found herself “roaming the streets of New York in men’s pajamas and combat boots interviewing rock stars and looking for trouble.” However trivial this “trouble” may appear to readers, Kennedy takes a curious pride in vigorously describing it in great detail throughout a memoir that’s as cheeky and snarky as her former on-air personality. A high school dropout who moved swiftly from an overnight radio internship in Los Angeles to a fill-in VJ spot, Kennedy plunged headfirst into the free-falling, adrenaline-fueled world of music videos, rock bands and rock stars. She shares a smattering of stories from encounters with musical dignitaries like Henry Rollins, Madonna, Dave Navarro, Courtney Love and Gwen Stefani, among others, all enriching an era that embodied a “collision of culture and media.” These vignettes complement pages of interviews with everyone from broadcast veteran Andy Schuon, who hired her at 19 with no broadcast experience, to Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy Corgan. After many successful incarnations of the live-broadcasted MTV Beach House segments in Malibu and the Hamptons, the termination of a series of late-night talk show pilots signaled the end of her tenure in 1997. Despite a knack for snappish commentary that reads easily, Kennedy’s memoir doesn’t translate as particularly illuminating, especially when her opinionated commentary nips at the rockers and co-VJs who made her youthful livelihood possible.
Mildly entertaining but superficial and unremarkable.Pub Date: July 30, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-250-01747-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2013
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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