A workmanlike but illuminating book for fans of the Ramones and punk rock in general.
The last Ramone standing dishes on Johnny, Joey, Dee Dee and Tommy, but the drummer is a lot more revealing about his own remarkable life outside the famously dysfunctional band.
There’s nothing in Ramone’s (born Marc Bell) sometimes bitingly funny rock ’n’ roll memoir that sheds new light on the Ramones’ notoriously eccentric band dynamic. Efforts to fully understand just how the Ramones operated remain as elusive as ever. However, this story about how a longshoreman’s son from Brooklyn somehow became one of the progenitors of a new musical art form born in the bowels of downtown dive bars is compelling enough on its own. The Ramones were still in their heyday in the late 1970s when Tommy Ramone, the group’s original drummer, decided he’d had enough. At the time, the soon-to-be Marky Ramone was already a key figure in the CBGBs music scene, helping to trumpet the arrival of the “Blank Generation” with the likes of Wayne County and Richard Hell and the Voidoids. “Richard was an interesting-looking guy,” writes the author. “He wore his hair kind of spikey. I didn’t know if it was intentional or just the result of not shampooing much.” Marky ultimately got the Ramones gig, and the New York rockers were able to march forward with their Chuck Taylors laced tight and their leather jackets zipped up. Unfortunately, the brotherhood was in shambles. The author recalls the ongoing fights and feuds, as well as his own descent into the bottle. Drumming for the Ramones sent him way over the edge and into a terrifying rehab center on Staten Island, but he was able to claw his way back to sobriety with a newfound sense of purpose. Sadly, time ran out for the rest of the Ramones, and they never got to fully share in brother Marky’s enlightenment.
A workmanlike but illuminating book for fans of the Ramones and punk rock in general.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-1451687750
Page Count: 416
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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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