Winning blend of headbanging trivia and adolescent fantasia.
Amusing, sweetly ramshackle compendium of a British lad’s heavy-metal memories.
Londoner Hunter’s debut traipses through the cultural funhouse of the 1980s, an era when sleazy, parent-offending metal achieved mainstream prominence. He recalls the enthusiasm first ignited by AC/DC’s “Let’s Get it Up,” when he was ten: “The world suddenly became three dimensional and my ears popped open.” The accessible lasciviousness of AC/DC and KISS provided Hunter with a valuable template, offering this clueless, nerdy adolescent a darker world of rebellion and sexuality. His dreary education became subordinate to his telescoping obsessions with bands like Judas Priest and Manowar, and after learning three guitar chords, he formed his first metal band, the comically inept Armageddon’s Ring. Hunter writes in a digressive style that allows him to track metal’s development from the decayed dreams of the late ’60s, which produced angry powerhouses like Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath, to the time of his immersion in the genre, when the “New Wave of British Heavy Metal” was ascendant and iconoclastic, imaginative bands like Iron Maiden transcended cult status to become a commercial force. Hunter examines metal’s secret language, encoded in strangely shaped guitars, overwrought soloing, and obscure tour T-shirts, a knowledge key to young fans’ snobbish allegiances. He alternates these passages (and tangential narratives regarding the international thrash/death-metal underground) with the tale of his stumbling musical ambitions. Hunter dropped out of school at 16 and grew his hair obsessively while laboring in bands like eXposed, Noise Royale, and Rag’n’Bones, whose misadventures ricochet off the big time but do make for droll reading. Although the narrative covers territory familiar from previous metal memoirs like Chuck Klosterman’s Fargo Rock City (2001), Hunter’s may be the funniest yet: his self-deprecating British humor highlights the absurdities inherent in the self-serious gloss of metal’s performers and fans capable of remarking with a straight face about Metallica, “What a silly name. . . . They won’t last long.”
Winning blend of headbanging trivia and adolescent fantasia.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2004
ISBN: 0-06-072292-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
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 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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