A well-crafted, intimate portrait of an unlikely, all-American rock-’n’-roll life.
Biography of a working-class teacher who became a prolific punk icon.
In his debut, writer and lyricist Cutter examines the life and art of the curmudgeonly, beloved Robert Pollard, leader of Guided by Voices, and his improbable success after years of home-recording obscurity. As Pollard recalls, “the fact that it actually happened when I was thirty-six, it was kind of mind-blowing.” Based on interviews with Pollard and other principals, the book mirrors the shaggy dog story feel of Pollard’s private universe of songcraft. The author acutely captures how Pollard’s wry self-mythologizing derives from his biographical relationship with Dayton, Ohio, its blue-collar eccentricities and rock-’n’-roll underground. During Pollard’s rowdy childhood, he both excelled in athletics and created a world of collage art and imaginary, epic rock bands; he began recording and sporadically performing with a circle of like-minded friends. At first, Pollard’s low-fi theatricality equally charmed and alienated his family, neighbors, and rival bands. He pursued these projects even as he started a family and became a well-liked teacher. All of this fed GBV’s strengths once they connected with the indie-rock cognoscenti. They eventually signed to Matador Records and went on to dominate the fervently self-aware, high-stakes, post-Nirvana 1990s indie scene. His childhood fantasies realized, success and endless touring drove Pollard to become outwardly abrasive and more domineering with his band mates, leading to high turnover and plenty of decadent backstage drama, all ably captured here. Still, Cutter portrays Pollard as a large-hearted figure, driven to maintain creative control and satisfy fans’ desire (and his own standards) for ever lengthier, crazed, and inebriated performances. Pollard has sporadically retired and revived GBV since 2004; Cutter concludes, “finally, Bob realized he didn’t need a label and its expectations to have what he’d always wanted.” The author’s lively writing captures the arc of indie-rock’s mainstreaming, although his exegesis of dozens of Pollard songs may appeal mainly to GBV’s (many) obsessive fans.
A well-crafted, intimate portrait of an unlikely, all-American rock-’n’-roll life.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-306-82576-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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