Far less scandalous than “rock drummer writes book” might suggest but far more interesting, too.
Recent Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee and Rush lyricist/drummer extraordinaire returns with another collection of essays about life on the road, the pleasures (and perils) of the journey and lessons learned along the way.
In continuing to chronicle his unique way of getting to “work”—that is, motorcycling between concert venues while his band mates, or the “Guys at Work,” travel by more conventional means—Peart (Far and Away: A Prize Every Time, 2011, etc.) serves up both a chronological and thematic sequel to his last collection. Originally published on the author’s website, these essays are very much intended for a core audience of Rush/Peart fans, though references to the band’s music and performances are less prevalent than might be assumed. Instead, the focus is on roads less traveled—primarily physically but also metaphorically—and the challenges and benefits of pursuing such paths, whether on a motorcycle or intellectually. As the author is fond of saying, “The best roads are the ones no one travels unless they live on them,” and he makes it his business to seek them out whether he’s traveling through the American Southwest, Canada or Eastern Europe. With the assistance of his riding companions/longtime friends/security detail, Michael and Brutus, Peart peppers the text with a series of photos that frequently show him riding off on his two-wheeled steed into parts un(der)explored. The author’s flair for mixing in local color, historical anecdotes and personal philosophy keeps pages turning even when the formulaic nature of the entries becomes repetitive. His sense of humor, by turns sophomoric and sophisticated, may induce occasional groans, but it’s a small price to pay to experience the sheer joy Peart takes in life and his passion for sharing it with others.
Far less scandalous than “rock drummer writes book” might suggest but far more interesting, too.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-1770412576
Page Count: 312
Publisher: ECW Press
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2014
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
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.
