Relentlessly enjoyable, and enhanced by the author’s absolute refusal to keep even a shred of his dignity intact.
Alternative music’s most obsessed-about icon gets the business from an appropriately obsessed fan.
Barely two pages into this “psychobio” of the former lead signer of The Smiths, the author opines, “Arguably, poor Oscar [Wilde] was merely an early, failed, and somewhat overweight prototype for Morrissey,” and not many more before he declares, “ ‘The Smiths’ is the greatest of the Smiths’ albums, making it, of course, the Greatest Album of All Time.” There’s a wink and a nudge here, of course: Simpson, known in his native Britain as a wickedly funny, out-there gay satirist, is well aware of just how unhinged—or, yes, “alarming”—he is going to sound to those not initiated into the cult of Morrissey, and he plays off that to an extent. But he still truly thinks that Morrissey is just about the best thing to have hit modern music since . . . well, anyone. To many, The Smiths was just a band of mopey Brits with a classically handsome, sexually ambiguous singer crooning about heartache over jangling guitars. But to a vociferous minority, Morrissey became an icon, an “anti-pop idol” in Simpson’s words; to this day, his solo concerts are mobbed by screaming fans. The author is not so concerned with rehashing the ups and downs of a landmark alternative band as he is with dissecting Morrissey himself: what makes the bookish, vegetarian, celibate Irish-Catholic from Manchester tick, and what draws his fans to him. No matter how hard he digs into the perverse appeal of a highly sexualized star who renounces sex itself, Simpson doesn’t quite get an answer, but along the way he is able to fire off plenty of tart darts at the pop-historical landscape, continually topping one ludicrously overreaching announcement (“Morrissey was the real mad lad holding the world hostage at the point of a pop single”) with another.
Relentlessly enjoyable, and enhanced by the author’s absolute refusal to keep even a shred of his dignity intact.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-7690-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2005
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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