Witty and wise; a true candidate for the All-Time Desert Island Top 5 Books About Pop Music.
A rock critic tells about the love of life via a series of 15 mix tapes full to bursting with songs of passion, regret and bad rhyme schemes.
Like any true music obsessive, Sheffield—a contributing editor at Rolling Stone, where he writes the “Pop Life” column—has a vast back catalog of mix tapes, either self-made or given as gifts. In this touching and frequently hilarious book, Sheffield structures each of the 15 chapters around a different mix tape, most of which relate in some way to his wife, Renée, who died of a sudden pulmonary embolism in 1997, after they'd been married for five years. Even though Sheffield was a geeky Irish Catholic music obsessive from Boston and Renée was a “real cool hell-raising Appalachian punk-rock girl” who was raised Southern Baptist, “rooted for the Atlanta Braves and sewed her own silver vinyl pants,” when the two met in Charlottesville, they clicked. Renée would take them driving for hours on southern roads just so they could sing along to songs on the radio, while Sheffield was the kind of guy who made mix tapes to do the dishes to. While eulogizing the punk awesomeness of Renée, Sheffield also throws in a surprisingly heartfelt eulogy for the unsung ’90s, “an open, free time of possibilities, changes we thought were permanent,” before radio lost its last vestige of non-homogenization, and Pavement was the greatest band of all time. This is a lightly-handled, skillful and sincere celebration of pop, of love, sad songs, bad songs and the long, nearly unbearable ache of being a young widower.
Witty and wise; a true candidate for the All-Time Desert Island Top 5 Books About Pop Music.Pub Date: Jan. 2, 2007
ISBN: 1-4000-8302-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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