by Phil Ramone & Charles L. Granata ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 2007
What it takes to make a hit record—and to handle success with grace, class and humor.
Portrait of the artist as a nice man.
Grammy-winning record producer/engineer Ramone has twiddled the knobs for some of modern music’s biggest-selling, most influential performers: Barbra Streisand, Billy Joel, Bob Dylan, B.B. King, Paul Simon and Carly Simon, among others. Considering his ability to connect with both his artists and the listening public, it’s not unfair to call him a recording-studio genius. But unlike many studio greats—yes, we’re talking to you, Phil Spector—Ramone is a sweet, compassionate gentleman who puts his artists’ happiness and comfort first. “I’ll do almost anything to please a client,” he writes. “Bring in comfortable furniture, put up special lighting, make sure that we have yellow jelly beans, or brown M&Ms.” Little wonder, then, that his memoir is warm and welcoming, the literary equivalent of sitting in the living room with your coolest uncle—who just so happens to have some awesome stories about how he cajoled Frank Sinatra into waxing his finest late-career recording. One of Ramone’s vital themes is the importance of the composer. “My career as an engineer and producer coincided with one of the most profound periods in pop music history: that of the contemporary singer-songwriter.” That being the case, it’s unsurprising that Ramone writes about his troubadour hyphenates with reverence and humility. For example, even though he played a vital part in writing and arranging some of Billy Joel’s most enduring albums (52nd Street, Glass Houses), Ramone humbly deflects credit, another one of the qualities that makes this book so affably readable. He also provides plenty of technical information about mixing and engineering, but it’s delivered in such an approachable manner that it will appeal to casual listeners and studio nerds alike.
What it takes to make a hit record—and to handle success with grace, class and humor.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-7868-6859-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2007
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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