An epic look at the man and his music.
A painstakingly traced chronicle of the remarkable career of powerhouse proletarian rocker Bruce Springsteen.
If you want to understand the magic and majesty that is The Boss, the best way is though his music. However, Carlin (Paul McCartney: A Life, 2009, etc.) successfully fills in some of the gaps Springsteen has left behind in his lifelong journey—at least the gaps New Jersey’s favorite son now appears willing to address. As one of the most celebrated lyricists in the history of popular music, Springsteen remains a man of few words. In fact, many of the quotes attributed to him have already been published elsewhere. Like a lyric sheet, they often don’t say much absent the spark of music. Carlin’s own expressiveness, however, is another story and will no doubt have readers reaching for their favorite electronic music delivery system in an attempt to immediately corroborate his take on specific Springsteen tracks and performances. The author presents his subject as a supremely gifted musician and truly heroic figure, albeit one with a lot on his troubled mind. That darkness, attributed to bad genes and a childhood spent in the shadow of his parents’ gloom following a tragic death in the family, at times reduces the working-class icon to a moody, self-centered and callous taskmaster. Surprisingly, none of these observations—taken in part or as a whole—is particularly damning. On the contrary, they might even serve to ground the ubiquitous superstar, allowing him to become more human and, ultimately, more understandable.
An epic look at the man and his music.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4391-9182-8
Page Count: 480
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Sept. 9, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
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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