This impressive, compendious biography is a must-read for fans of the Beatles and other seminal rock groups of the 1960s and...
A Beatles expert recounts Sir George Martin’s (1926-2016) years producing the Fab Four’s final records, their breakup, and his career afterward.
In this final volume of the meticulous and lively biography of the famed Beatles music producer, Womack (English/Monmouth Univ.; Maximum Volume: The Life of Beatles Producer George Martin, the Early Years, 1926-1966, 2017, etc.) resumes after the release of the groundbreaking album “Rubber Soul.” The author invites us into the Beatles’ world with assurance and aplomb as he guides us through the creation of some of the group’s greatest musical achievements. In 1966, Martin observed the band grumbling about live performances and complaining about deficiencies in Martin’s Abbey Road studio. Brian Epstein, the band’s manager, explored recording at Stax Records in Memphis, but Martin was never keen to move. Meanwhile, Paul McCartney had a song about a spinster, and John Lennon wrote one influenced by his first LSD experience. As Martin recalled, “their ideas were beginning to become much more potent in the studio.” While working on a new album, the band’s “Penny Lane” single kept them high on music charts. Womack is excellent at chronicling the group’s ever increasing creative relationship with Martin as he helped channel their energy and excitement into exploring new ways of producing records. He called McCartney’s idea about using “alter egos” to sing songs on “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” a “revelation” and “She’s Leaving Home” one of the “best constructed songs they ever did.” Martin helped them score the end of “A Day in the Life” and drew upon his orchestral expertise to add strings and brass to their compositions. Womack also reveals how much influence Martin had on the placement of certain songs on the albums. After the Beatles, the wizard behind the curtain continued making his own records and producing for Jeff Beck, Cheap Trick, and Elton John.
This impressive, compendious biography is a must-read for fans of the Beatles and other seminal rock groups of the 1960s and '70s.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-912777-74-0
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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