Everything you always wanted to know about the Thin White Duke. Everything.
Musically speaking, David Bowie never quite reached the critical or popular heights of fellow UK rockers the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Who and Led Zeppelin—granted, that was due in part to poor timing, as he came onto the scene at the tail end of the British Invasion. Yet despite his inconsistent catalog, he's managed to remain in the public consciousness for more than 40 years, which explains why he's proven to be a fascinating subject for long biographies. In 2009, Marc Spitz delivered the doorstopper Bowie: A Biography, and Nicholas Pegg is set to release The Complete David Bowie in late 2011. So does Ziggy Stardust merit all this coverage? Former Mojo editor Trynka offers an emphatic yes. The author gave Bowie's contemporary Iggy Pop the same treatment with Iggy Pop: Open Up and Bleed (2008), an insanely in-depth, honest and readable biography. Here, Trynka once again covers it all—the music, the movies, the marriages, the shifting personae, the drugs, the drugs and the drugs—in a breezy, chatty style that often reads as a novel. The author remains objective about Bowie's music, most notably during his lengthy discussion about how much of a hand his sidemen played in the development and recording of his records, and the fact that Trynka isn't sycophantic about David's undeniably hit-and-miss discography helps legitimize the project. But despite its numerous positive attributes, the book is exhaustive to a fault. By the time most readers are three-quarters of the way through, they'll probably want to listen to "Space Oddity" and "Heroes," then call it a day. Bowie nerds will love it, and music nerds will admire it; regular nerds and most others will think it's about 150 pages too long.
Pub Date: July 18, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-316-03225-4
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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
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