A gauzy, PG-13 love letter from NKOTB to the throngs of faithful women responsible for making their rock-star dreams come...
The story of how five boys from Boston rose from nothing to become unlikely international recording stars in the late 1980s—and the more interesting story of the legion of devoted “Blockheads” that has sustained them ever since.
None of the largely nondescript personalities (save perhaps the gregarious Donnie Wahlberg) that comprise the New Kids on the Block is revealed to any significant degree in Van Noy’s (So Much to Say: Dave Matthews Band—20 Years on the Road, 2011) otherwise readable band biography. But that clearly is not the point. Instead, the author is more concerned with illustrating the truly fascinating (bewildering?) bond that has seemingly been magically forged between NKOTB and their female fans—aka “Blockheads.” The author quotes random fans extensively, and she dutifully chronicles the group’s humble beginnings on the streets of Boston to their jet-setting zenith conquering the pop world. Despite the general banality of Jordan, Jon, Joe, Donnie and Danny, there is true profundity in the stories of accomplished adult women who, during their formative years, fell in love with five flickering images on TV screens and never let go. Van Noy maintains the gossamer veneer throughout, collecting the band’s dirty laundry and tidily stowing it far out of sight. The author quickly skates over many of the intragroup conflicts – including hot-button issues like NKOTB’s decision to part ways with original producer Maurice Starr, Joey McIntyre’s gripes about his perennial outsider status and Jon Knight’s surprising sexuality. Even though the NKOTB/Blockhead romance burned as hot as a neutron star inside teenage girls’ hearts, you’d never know it by the way Van Noy manages to keep everything so chaste.
A gauzy, PG-13 love letter from NKOTB to the throngs of faithful women responsible for making their rock-star dreams come true.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-6785-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2012
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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