Bowie still deserves a full-dress serious biography, which would benefit from a touch of this book’s reckless spirit.
A lengthy critical tribute to David Bowie’s pop-cultural legacy, with a particular emphasis on his epochal 1970s work.
This book by British musician and longtime pop-music writer Morley (Earthbound, 2013, etc.) is a deliberately disorganized affair. The author opens with long, often shapeless encomiums to the singer’s shape-shifting persona along with first-person gassing about his response to Bowie’s death in early 2016; he’s nearly 80 pages in before he begins delivering conventional biographical information about Bowie’s birth and upbringing. “I blame Bowie,” he writes. “He made me think this way. He made me write this way.” Morley knows his subject well, though, and once he’s settled into a narrative groove, he delivers thoughtful treatments of the earliest stages of Bowie’s career, and he has a knack for finding a rational thread for each of Bowie’s peculiar shifts in the 1960s and ’70s. An early novelty tune, “The Laughing Gnome,” is “Bowie testing all sorts of tolerances”; with his breakthrough 1971 album, “Hunky Dory,” he’s “transcending the fraught categories of male and female”; 1973's “Aladdin Sane” is “the rock album the Rolling Stones would make if they were into Brecht, Brel, Burroughs, and Ballard.” Morley foregrounds Bowie’s art over his biography: he’s less interested in why, for instance, in the ’90s, Bowie sold bonds backed by future royalties or took a role in the cult film Labyrinth than in how such moves fit with a persona afraid to ever look redundant. Morley is too often reflexively approving of everything Bowie did, and sometimes his prose slackens into nonsense (“another centre in a story filled with centres, but one that can be placed at the very centre of those centres”), but his year-by-year race through his subject’s work is often inspired, matching a grasp of history with keen critical assessment.
Bowie still deserves a full-dress serious biography, which would benefit from a touch of this book’s reckless spirit.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5115-6
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 19, 2016
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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