A comprehensive, sternly opinionated chronicle of the band that embodied with fabulous commercial success the sensibility of Los Angeles in the 1970s. Eliot (Walt Disney, 1993, etc.) interviewed ex-Eagles as well as many friends and business associates, and with resigned distaste these sources attest to the pile-up of personal conflicts, pharmaceutical excess, and cutthroat business shenanigans that gradually took shape beneath the band’s lilting parade of hits until, on their 1976 concept album, Hotel California, they nakedly trumpeted their bitter, burnt-out, coked-up disillusionment itself as their aesthetic driving force. The four original Eagles converged on L.A. from the Midwest and Texas in the late —60s, struggling until they came together to back up Linda Ronstadt. Eliot gives a sharp overview of how the Eagles, Ronstadt, and Jackson Browne struck gold via Asylum Records founder David Geffen. The Eagles were, Eliot contends, as much a business proposition by Geffen as a musical venture. Singer/drummer Don Henley concurs: —Money was a much saner goal than adoration . . . [I]f I—m gonna blow my brains out for five years, I want something to show for it.— Geffen, scary mogul Irving Azoff, and Henley all provide alarming insights here into how the music business operates. The band roster changed several times, but the members became progressively more popular—their greatest-hits collection is one of the two top-selling albums of all time—until melodramatic squabbles among all the members, but especially between Henley and co-leader Glenn Frey, dissolved the band in 1980. While Eliot’s a fan, his judgments on individual songs and events are often acerbic. With the Eagles now middle-aged and detoxed, their recent reunion tour, he writes, —was like watching a nineties production of Beatlemania performed by the Beatles themselves.— If you can take the pervasive atmosphere of cynical, calculating hedonism—that is, if you—re an Eagles fan—you couldn—t ask for a truer portrait. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-316-23370-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1998
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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