With train-wreck moments and tender interludes alike, a book that delivers a sharply detailed Kodachrome of a brilliant...
Searching biography of the renowned songwriter, well known for his melancholic songs and competitive, perfectionist nature.
The former longtime critic for the Los Angeles Times, Hilburn (Johnny Cash: The Life, 2013, etc.) ranks high in the firmament of writers on popular music, a fitting match for a subject who himself is very nearly—but perhaps not quite—the equal of Lennon, McCartney, and Dylan, on all of whom Paul Simon (b. 1941) modeled himself. “They wouldn’t settle for just good,” said Simon of the famous competitiveness between Lennon and McCartney. “That was me, too.” In public high school in New York, he teamed, fatefully, with the pure-voiced Art Garfunkel, who would be both his sounding board and his bête noire for decades to come, the subject of constant tension and the agent of transcendent musical moments. When, after several years of constant hit-making, Garfunkel took an interest in acting, the duo began to drift apart. However, writes the author, the story is a touch more complicated, for Mike Nichols offered Simon a part in Catch-22 as well only for it to wind up being cut before the film was shot. Former spouse Carrie Fisher recalls the difficulties that ensued when her own star rose as a result of the Star Wars films, when leaving him to go off and film led Simon to think of the job as “being more important to me than he was.” The gossipy stuff is all nicely juicy, especially as concerns Garfunkel, with whom, it would appear, Simon will never really make peace. But what are more important are the music and Simon’s contributions to popular culture through his songs; it’s telling, in that regard, that Simon took Elvis Presley’s death to be a warning about “the danger of not making music your top priority.” Throughout a career that stretches back seven decades, Simon has clearly never forgotten where his priorities lie.
With train-wreck moments and tender interludes alike, a book that delivers a sharply detailed Kodachrome of a brilliant musician.Pub Date: May 8, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-1212-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2018
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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
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
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