A matter-of-fact epilogue with advice for up-and-coming stars is sensible, but the book’s gossipy, annoyed attitude...
A memoir of the music business from a manager who worked his way up from the mailroom to managing world-class acts.
With the help of collaborator Goldsher (My Favorite Fangs: The Story of the Von Trapp Family Vampires, 2012, etc.), Weisner dishes the dirt on 50 years in the music business. It’s a strange collection of anecdotes, ranging from the poignant (an 8-year-old piano prodigy serenading Beyonce Knowles at a benefit) to the outright bizarre (a profanity-laden threat to Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner over the publication of an unflattering photograph). Other superstars praise the producer—the book includes short memories penned by the likes of Gladys Knight, Steve Winwood and Quincy Jones—but there’s also plenty of vitriol. While venting about most members of the Jackson family, especially patriarch Joe, Weisner reserves fondness for the late Michael, whom he stewarded through the height of his career and about whom he shares previously unknown stories (who knew the inspiration for Michael’s uniforms came from punk-pop star Adam Ant?). Upon seeing the fading star just days before his death, the author writes, “He had that look in his eyes, a look I’ve seen too many other times in my life, a look of resignation, a look that said, It’s over, and it broke my heart, because up until things headed south in the early 2000s, he had it all.” Others earn less charitable plaudits—Lauryn Hill is labeled a “whack-job” for her behavior during the 2005 BET Awards. Weisner is particularly harsh about Madonna’s behavior during a Venice video shoot: “Every time we packed up the cameras, she bitched. Every time we got into a boat, she bitched. Every time she had to wait for setup, she bitched.”
A matter-of-fact epilogue with advice for up-and-coming stars is sensible, but the book’s gossipy, annoyed attitude threatens to disenfranchise all but the most cynical fans.Pub Date: June 3, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-7627-9144-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Lyons Press
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
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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