An earnest elegy to the band life.
A music fan pursues stardom in a memoir that plumbs the depths of playing bars and clubs in search of fame.
Sterling (Teenage Degenerate, 2016) recounts his misadventures while struggling to attain rock ‘n’ roll stardom. The author, by his own admission, wasn’t a naturally gifted musician; he struggled to learn how to play bass, but his persistence and devotion allowed him to eventually play a host of seedy venues in and around Denver with his buddy, Jake, and his band mates, Seth and Cody. But then, on New Year’s Eve 2000 “just like that, after three and a half years, hundreds of shows, countless hours of practice, one EP, and one full-length CD, the band was over.” The breakup of this first band echoes throughout the book. Over the next years, Sterling played with three other bands that toured out of Colorado, and the book details a blur of concerts and van trips, all soaked in beer, as life on the road brought the young musicians only privation and sleeplessness. Sterling has a natural, easygoing prose style that suits his tale of the difficulties of making it in the music world. However, the narrative often dwells excessively on the mind-numbing details of band life, so that the many gigs and road trips begin to blur together. Sterling offers his most engaging work when talking about his relationship with a woman named Ana, or when analyzing his own failures, which he reveals with disarming frankness. Indeed, this honesty is more engaging than the beer binges and gigging that make up most of the narrative; also, after a while, the author’s penchant for the F-word gets a bit annoying. One message, though, emerges from these recollections—that the author’s love of music never wavered.
An earnest elegy to the band life.Pub Date: April 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-9970175-8-8
Page Count: 187
Publisher: No Bueno Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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