More than a footnote to the rise and fall of one of the last great rock bands.
When did the Clash quit being “the only band that matters”?
This fascinating book faces a challenge: documenting the final years of the British band that its record label had promoted with that slogan. It’s a period the band has disavowed and that critics have generally reviled, resulting in one album released after this version of the band had effectively disbanded and which the Clash has omitted from its authorized anthology. The best that Andersen (co-author: Dance of Days: Two Decades of Punk in the Nation's Capital, 2009) and Heibutzki (Unfinished Business-The Life and Times of Danny Gatton, 2003) can say about the album, “Cut the Crap,” recorded with only two original members, is that it was “indeed unique, if also sometimes a bit of a car wreck.” As much as the Clash as a band, the authors focus on the Clash as an idea, an interchange of rebellious fervor between artist and audience and perhaps more timely than ever with the ascent of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. The authors risk oversimplifying what led the Clash to this juncture: a split between Joe Strummer and Mick Jones, whose more commercial-sounding hits were at odds with the band’s activist urgency. There’s also a bigger tension at work: how rock can possibly fight the system from within the system—recording for a huge conglomerate—and how it can become popular enough to wield significant influence without succumbing to the temptations of rock stardom. Following a large festival payday, Strummer and the band sacked Jones (after their drummer had already been sidelined by heroin addiction) and recruited a new lineup under the old name. However, they could never agree on what the new Clash was supposed to be, and Strummer and his manager ultimately found themselves at irreparable odds. The band may no longer have mattered, but its legacy mattered to the authors, who make it matter to the readers.
More than a footnote to the rise and fall of one of the last great rock bands.Pub Date: July 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-61775-293-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Akashic
Review Posted Online: April 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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