by Mike Lankford ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 1997
A witty, often endearing throwaway memoir of a young musician's professional coming-of-age in the '60s and early '70s. Lankford discovered his vocation at age 13, upon seeing his first live rock 'n' roll band. Soon he had managed to persuade his baleful mother to let him take out a loan and buy a drum kit, and after the standard period of godawful-racket-making, he joined a succession of garage bands in his Oklahoma hometown. Lankford captures the ludicrous joys and irrational woes of membership in a rock band. In one very funny set piece, the author describes in devastating detail his disastrous first and only attempt to sing lead: ``Dancers became paralyzed and clumsy, faces rigid. A certain wide-eyed unfocused look swept the room like a fog. Suddenly, everyone was just going through the motions, pretending to dance, pretending to smile, pretending to be there.'' After a stint in a band with significant local renown, Lankford got a call from a tiny blues combo passing through town whose drummer had quit suddenly. He wound up touring the country with the two veteran musicians for two years, playing invariably ratty dives and reaping the benefits of his bandmates' decades of musical and life experience. Lankford tells some excellent road stories, from hauling a wounded pheasant into the van (``I'm going to eat him,'' explains Dennis, the organist and driver) to breaking down during a South Dakota blizzard while searching for a town called Deadwood. In addition to witnessing much drunkenness and one murder, the author tried heroin once under the tutelage of the group's guitarist. The emotional and physical wear of this kind of touring drove Lankford out of the business entirely by age 23. Very likable, but essentially a string of anecdotes that don't cohere into anything larger.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-8118-0683-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1996
Share your opinion of this book
by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
Share your opinion of this book
More by Elie Wiesel
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 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
Share your opinion of this book
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Hey there, book lover.
We’re glad you found a book that interests you!
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Don’t fret. We’ll find you.