A serviceable rock bio in which nobody, including the author, takes it easy.
A veteran British rock journalist takes creative flight in a book about an all-American band.
In the acknowledgments, Wall, the author of When Giants Walked the Earth and other music bios, doesn’t thank the members of the Eagles or anyone in their orbits. Instead, he leans heavily on those who have written about the Eagles before, along with a “distillation” of his own “archive of interviews not just with members of the Eagles but with hundreds of other significant figures from the same period.” Much of the material feels secondhand and sometimes stale, and the narrative is often scattershot. However, it’s also entertaining and often edgy. At the very least, Wall captures the spirit of that era’s “fast lane” in a manner reminiscent of a highly caffeinated Tom Wolfe, treating the band in the manner that Wolfe did Phil Spector or the Merry Pranksters. In one early scene, Wall takes us to the Troubadour in LA, where you go “to get drunk, get loaded, and get laid.” There, he introduces us to “Linda Ronstadt—the cute cut-off denim shorts and sweet brown doll’s eyes, the Troubadour girl with the sunny small-town smile and the voice of a cactus mountain goddess, the super-groovy chick that all the would-be groovy guys want the most.” There’s still more to that sentence, about how Ronstadt (apparently) says, “there are two sets of Troubadour regulars, ‘the musician pool and the sex pool.’ ” As an exercise in style, the text provides most of the substance of the band’s stories, including the shifts in balances of power, management issues, and the passage of time that left leaders Glenn Frey and Don Henley at loggerheads. Then they vowed that they would never engage in a cash-grab reunion—until they did, with a “farewell” that has now lasted decades longer than the band’s original “long run.”
A serviceable rock bio in which nobody, including the author, takes it easy.Pub Date: July 11, 2023
ISBN: 9781635768909
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Diversion Books
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2023
A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.
The iconic model tells the story of her eventful life.
According to the acknowledgments, this memoir started as "a fifty-page poem and then grew into hundreds of pages of…more poetry." Readers will be glad that Anderson eventually turned to writing prose, since the well-told anecdotes and memorable character sketches are what make it a page-turner. The poetry (more accurately described as italicized notes-to-self with line breaks) remains strewn liberally through the pages, often summarizing the takeaway or the emotional impact of the events described: "I was / and still am / an exceptionally / easy target. / And, / I'm proud of that." This way of expressing herself is part of who she is, formed partly by her passion for Anaïs Nin and other writers; she is a serious maven of literature and the arts. The narrative gets off to a good start with Anderson’s nostalgic memories of her childhood in coastal Vancouver, raised by very young, very wild, and not very competent parents. Here and throughout the book, the author displays a remarkable lack of anger. She has faced abuse and mistreatment of many kinds over the decades, but she touches on the most appalling passages lightly—though not so lightly you don't feel the torment of the media attention on the events leading up to her divorce from Tommy Lee. Her trip to the pages of Playboy, which involved an escape from a violent fiance and sneaking across the border, is one of many jaw-dropping stories. In one interesting passage, Julian Assange's mother counsels Anderson to desexualize her image in order to be taken more seriously as an activist. She decided that “it was too late to turn back now”—that sexy is an inalienable part of who she is. Throughout her account of this kooky, messed-up, enviable, and often thrilling life, her humility (her sons "are true miracles, considering the gene pool") never fails her.
A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2023
ISBN: 9780063226562
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
SEEN & HEARD
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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