The expanding country bookshelf has another welcome addition.
A solid, incisive biography of the last singer universally acknowledged as the greatest in country music.
It’s to Kienzle’s (Southwest Shuffle: Pioneers of Honky Tonk, Western Swing, and Country Jazz, 2003, etc.) credit that he neither downplays his subject’s notorious personal life nor allows it to overshadow the soulful majesty of his music. A veteran country-music journalist and historian, the author maintains that “Jones’s life and music are inseparable” and that the demons he battled—alcohol, cocaine, marital discord—were inextricable from the depths of emotion he plumbed through his unique timbre and phrasing. From Johnny Cash to Buck Owens, other masters of country music acknowledged that Jones had no peer as a country singer among the generations that followed Hank Williams, whom Jones initially did his best to imitate. Said Pappy Daily, who managed and nominally produced Jones through his early ascent, “George, you’ve sung like Roy Acuff, Lefty Frizzell, Hank Williams, and Bill Monroe. Can you sing like George Jones?” Once he developed his signature style—twisting a single syllable into three or four while retaining his raw, pure country essence—everyone in Nashville celebrated his artistry as the gold standard. Yet they also assumed that he would follow his idol Williams into an early grave and that loving this sincere and honest man meant having to forgive what a mean drunk and undependable performer he was. Even when he showed up, “No Show Jones” might not be able to stand up. His marriage to Tammy Wynette was pretty much a train wreck, though it elevated the profiles of both. In chronicling the rise, fall, and ultimate salvation of Jones, Kienzle relies more on secondary sources and archival material than on original reporting. With all the credit he gives Nancy Sepulvado Jones for saving her husband’s life as well as his career, it’s a shame the author never interviewed her. But as a straightforward, chronological celebration of the life of an American master, the biography gives Jones his due.
The expanding country bookshelf has another welcome addition.Pub Date: March 29, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-230991-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 25, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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