Like most of Wall's books, this one will be best appreciated by devotees of the band, which, given the fact that AC/DC has...
Comprehensive, albeit indirect, retelling of how an unlikely collection of lads road the highway to hell straight into the upper echelons of rock’s pantheon of gods.
U.K. rock journalist Wall (Enter Night: A Biography of Metallica, 2011, etc.) begins where any good history of the seminal band should: wild man singer and all-around-good-time-guy Bon Scott cheating death after a near-fatal motorcycle accident. Alas, even the delightfully and demonically charged Scott couldn't outwit the grim reaper very long, dying soon after that at the age of 33 following a particularly shady night of partying. Not surprisingly, the author devotes many pages to Scott in an examination of the legendary lothario's desperate efforts to make it as a rock singer in far-flung Australia. Wall parallels that rough-and-tumble odyssey with that of a diminutive pair of belligerent brothers almost a decade Scott's junior: Malcolm and Angus Young. According to the author, the Youngs ruled—and continue to rule—AC/DC with absolute, iron-fisted authority. At the time, that forced even the supremely talented and singularly gifted Scott to constantly watch his step—and keep his distance. Nevertheless, the author notes that Angus, the guitar-obsessed problem child in the iconic schoolboy uniform, "loved" Scott. Unfortunately, none of the members of the band participated in the writing, so the author relies on mostly third-party accounts and previously published interviews to get a real sense of the interband dynamic. That's not necessarily a bad thing, since the principals in anyone's life story can often be the most myopic. Among the most revelatory items: Angus was hooked on milkshakes, and AC/DC was glam!
Like most of Wall's books, this one will be best appreciated by devotees of the band, which, given the fact that AC/DC has sold more than 200 million albums worldwide, is quite a large audience.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-250-03874-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2013
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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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