An engrossing cultural narrative, riddled with bombastic prose.
A detailed biography of the Rolling Stones, emphasizing musical minutiae and salacious recollections.
Davis (Jajouka Rolling Stone, 1993, etc.) leaves no “stone” unturned in this close examination of the Stones’ early-1960s formation and rapid dominance of rock culture, despite strife that would end the careers of most. Davis insists, sometimes pretentiously, that the confluence of events that brought together Brian Jones, Keith Richards, and Mick Jagger among postwar British blight represents a quasi-religious, signal cultural moment: “The Rolling Stones story does have a pantheistic mythos about it.” Davis acknowledges the crucial transformation of Missisippi Delta blues into the amplified urban variety played by Muddy Waters and Sonny Boy Williamson, which provoked a late-’50s European cognoscenti cult. It was on this early blues-worshipping circuit that the Rolling Stones formed, out of various cobbled-together R&B combos. Davis hones in on how their distinct personalities—Jones’s curiosity and sadism, Jagger’s raw sensuality and business acumen, and Richards’s dark appetites and assured playing—along with the talents of relatively “normal” drummer Charlie Watts and pianist Ian Stewart, formed a surprisingly adaptive rock-’n’-roll juggernaut. Between 1962 and 1966, they conquered “Swinging London,” and then became British teen sensations—somewhat incongruously, given their borrowed American R&B stylings. The Stones responded to 1960s turmoil with a remarkable series of albums and singles (Let It Bleed, etc.) that competed with Dylan, Hendrix, and the Beatles for rock primacy, despite a descent into debauchery that included Jones’s mysterious death, the murderous debacle of Altamont, Jagger’s participation in the doomed porn-art film Performance, and Richards’s alcoholism and heroin addiction. Yet the ’70s and ’80s saw the Stones become an increasingly profitable, corporate rock warhorse, their personal, legal, and tax difficulties notwithstanding. Davis skillfully recreates this brittle milieu of sleazy fame, in which figures like Andy Warhol, Gram Parsons, Chuck Berry, and Marianne Faithfull appear alongside the Hells Angels, underage groupies, and seemingly every hustler who ever nourished the band’s dark desires.
An engrossing cultural narrative, riddled with bombastic prose.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2001
ISBN: 0-7679-0312-9
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2001
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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