The lead singer of The Who tells all—sometimes laconically, sometimes archly, but always unflinchingly.
Daltrey begins and ends his charming, too-short memoir with a common trope: a teacher who tells him he’ll never amount to anything. He reveals a rosebud early on, too: a flannel shirt that his loving mother bought him so that he wouldn’t have to suffer his school’s “itchy, scratchy, horrible, bloody pullover.” Toughened by the hardscrabble neighborhood in which he was raised, beaten up for his refusal to back down, Daltrey earned a reputation for bellicosity, including punching out his band mates in The Who, the band he founded and to which longtime foil Pete Townshend was a latecomer. (In one notorious row, Townshend punched first, getting knocked out for his troubles.) The author’s affection for his band mates is evident, though he is less than patient with the late bassist John Entwistle, who never played at any volume other than loud and spent his considerable fortune on drugs. Along the way, Daltrey reveals a few tricks of the trade, including how he came to swing his microphone so vigorously and potentially lethally. “I started twirling my microphone not because of my ego,” he writes, “but because I didn’t know what to do with my hands during the solos.” He also reveals how the band’s considerable stagecraft evolved as a way to fill a stadium that, unlike the Beatles’ audiences, was not overrun by screaming girls. Thus they made their own deafening roar, for which reason, notes Daltrey with pleasing self-deprecation, “septuagenarian Pete and me have to ask you to say that again, only a bit louder.” The author praises Townshend for his indefatigability and work ethic, but it’s clear he lacks neither: After all, while his mates were doing drugs, he was stripping varnish off medieval beams and building lakes on his country estate, a pastime he recommends. Throughout, he allows, he’s been “a lucky bugger.”
Unaffected, lucid, and entertaining: One of the best rock memoirs in recent memory.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-29603-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Oct. 23, 2018
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PERSPECTIVES
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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