A wild rock ’n’ roll ride.
The head writer for the Onion A.V. Club goes native with Phishheads and Juggalos.
Where many writers might have picked one band to follow on tour and focused on the band itself, Rabin (The Big Rewind: A Memoir Brought to You by Pop Culture, 2009, etc.) thought it would be intriguing to cover two bands from the perspective of their fans. And what better fans to explore than the most reviled and fanatic ones in popular music, those who follow jam band Phish and those in the shadow of Detroit’s lumpen Insane Clown Posse? On the face of it, the bands and their fans seem irreconcilably different. Phish, a quartet co-founded and led by guitar god Trey Anastasio at the University of Vermont, appeals largely to middle-class kids with some college education. The duo ICP, brainchild of a ninth-grade dropout named Joseph Bruce who calls himself Violent J, appeals mainly to young, working-class males. But both bands are steeped in their unique mythologies. Along the way, Rabin ran into people who defy the stereotypes—MAs among the Juggalos and straight-edge people among the Phishheads, for example. Each group’s tours also create anarchic carnival atmospheres (ICP quite deliberately) that celebrate and create the illusion of unending childhood. But Rabin got more than he bargained for when, midtour with Phish, he had something resembling a nervous breakdown. The steady ingestion of psychotropic drugs, one accouterment both camps had in ready supply, may not have helped his mental state. Rabin’s personal misadventures, instigated by a tendency toward manic depression and irritated by paranoia over his beautiful girlfriend’s feelings for him, may seem an irrelevant distraction, but many will find that his gonzo approach to journalism makes him a spiritual kin of Hunter S. Thompson and Matt Taibbi.
A wild rock ’n’ roll ride.Pub Date: June 11, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4516-2688-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2013
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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