A must-read for pop-music lovers.
An influential rock critic shares highlights from more than 40 years in the business.
Longtime Los Angeles Times pop-music journalist Hilburn (Springsteen, 1986, etc.) looks back on the path he followed into what he calls “the best job in the world,” from a boyhood spent listening to his uncle’s blues and country records in Louisiana to a stint as a reporter for his San Fernando Valley high-school newspaper, for which he reviewed Elvis Presley in Love Me Tender. The book is not exactly a memoir, but rather a review of the major developments in popular music that the author played a part in shaping, both as a prescient champion of performers (Elton John, Bruce Springsteen and U2, for example) and as a sensitive interviewer who earned the trust of some of the most notoriously difficult subjects in music (most notably, Janis Joplin and Bob Dylan). Fans of Springsteen, Dylan and U2 will be thrilled to find multiple chapters devoted to their idols, who are clearly Hilburn’s favorites as well. He generously shares pages of quotes from his interviews on subjects ranging from musical influences—not surprisingly, almost everyone cites Elvis—and the craft of songwriting to the difficulty of maintaining a personal life apart from career and celebrity. The most intriguing sections, however, are the glimpses into the private lives of a who’s who of popular music in the 20th century: Johnny Cash preparing to take the stage at Folsom Prison and, late in life, at a rural Virginia barn dance; Colonel Parker keeping a tight rein on Elvis in Vegas; John Lennon sneaking chocolate and relishing cornflakes and cream at the Dakota; Michael Jackson pillow-fighting with six-year-olds while Brooke Shields and her mother waited for a date; Courtney Love beside herself worrying about Kurt Cobain. Because the incidents illustrate Hilburn’s main points about the character of the acts he believes are most worth listening to, the gossip is guilt-free.
A must-read for pop-music lovers.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-59486-921-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Rodale
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2009
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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