Part celebration, part poignant reflection, Aoki’s life story is as rhythmic and textured as his music.
A trendsetter in the electronic dance music genre lays down a portrait of self-discovery in shades of blue.
Growing up “the only Asian kid in a lily-white, same-seeming neighborhood [in] Newport Beach, California,” Aoki, one of the world’s most popular DJs, portrays himself as “the quintessential outsider.” He was an equal mix of his larger-than-life, Benihana restaurant–founding father and his more reserved mother—“a compassionate soul. A gentle spirit. An open mind.” He spent his youth stirring restlessly in the sanctuary of music, devoting himself first to Michael Jackson and later to hardcore and punk, all of which would inform his future sound as a leader in the EDM scene. “[I] wasn’t planning on becoming a DJ. Never even thought about it,” he writes. “And so the story of how I went from an aspiring musician to a promoter to a record label ‘executive’ to where I am now is a lesson in resilience, resourcefulness.” Detailing those lessons, Aoki moves through the years, from his earliest hardcore garage band memories and 1996 founding of Dim Mak Records to his first appearances at Coachella, when he was still searching for his voice. Eventually developing motifs such as “caking” audiences that came to embody his style, he matured as an artist and eventually achieved whirlwind notoriety that quickly spun into icon status among denizens of the EDM subculture. Throughout, the author shares candid self-assessments and revealing insights about major events in his life, including his divorce, his father’s death, and his struggles with drinking. As he writes, “I didn’t realize it at the time but my early shows had no essence to them…no heart…no personality. I couldn’t put myself into what I was doing because I was hiding in the fog of being drunk….Connectivity…that became my thing. Should have been my thing all along.”
Part celebration, part poignant reflection, Aoki’s life story is as rhythmic and textured as his music.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-11167-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Aug. 24, 2019
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
