No doubt Lydon's title alludes to Home Fires, Donald Katz's 1992 study of her nuclear family as an American microcosm. And no doubt too that, as the title says, Lydon took a very long way home, through the grimiest tunnel of drug addiction—and that her terrible, wonderful story, though partly sketched by Katz, comes fully alive only in her own retelling. Lydon's been clean for seven years now, after more than two decades of slavery to the needle and the pipe, and the extensive practice she's had during her recovery in telling hard truths about herself (a 12-Steps basic) pays off here—as does her experience as a professional writer: ``The past few months had been my roughest ever: I'd been raped, robbed, jilted, degraded, demoralized and hit what I thought was really the bottom, turning tricks with freaks from Mousey's.'' A deeper bottom was yet to come, though—quite a comedown for a nice Jewish girl from Long Island who went to Vassar on scholarship, helped edit the first issue of Rolling Stone, and got a book deal with Random House—until junk took it all away, and her little girl too, turning her into a heroin-addicted zombie- whore staggering through Manhattan's Lower East Side in search of highs. Lydon's well-detailed account of her decay is painful and shocking—but it's her recovery in the firm hands of an all-woman group in Boston that really hits hard, as, no longer bandaged by drugs, her emotions scrape and chafe until she accepts the brutal facts: of likely childhood incest, of dependence on men, of her abandonment of her daughter, of chipping away at her essence day after day for another hit of ersatz heaven. Lydon lays bare her sins, her struggle, her soul here. It's a profoundly moving act of courage, of interest to all concerned with the best—and the worst—of the human spirit.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250550-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1993
A dry exegesis of country music by the author of Electronic Hearth (1991). Tichi (English/Vanderbilt Univ.) is a novice fan of country music whose background is strongest in American literature and art. Proceeding thematically, she addresses common issues in American culture, including the tension between the individual and society, the lure of home versus the call of the road, and nature as both a nurturing and potentially dangerous force. Lacing together anecdotes, interviews, and analysis of songs, she comes to the conclusion that country music addresses many of the same topics as more ``serious'' art forms, making it ``emphatically [a] national music.'' While her discussions can be interesting, ultimately she offers little new to explain the popularity or quality of country music. The musicians she favors—Emmylou Harris, Rodney Crowell, Laurie Lewis, Nanci Griffith, and Barry and Holly Tashian—all come out of a folk-rock background (in the '70s, they would have been called singer/songwriters), so they naturally tend to take an intellectual, pseudoliterary approach to songwriting and performance. Tichi's musical knowledge is slim, leading to some factual errors, as when she ascribes ``Dueling Banjos'' to Earl Scruggs, though it was in fact recorded by Marshall Brickman and Eric Weissberg. And the comment that ``the ability to read music would be futile for bluegrass...the music simply moves too fast to be read off the page'' would come as a surprise to any classical violinist who's ever tackled Paganini. The book is accompanied by a CD that primarily focuses on new country acts; this material is readily available, and it would be surprising if a reader who was attracted to this book did not already own most of these recordings. A tip of the academic mortarboard towards the ten-gallon-hat crowd that will befuddle members of both groups. (122 b&w photos and 16-page color insert)
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1994
ISBN: 0-8078-2134-9
Page Count: 350
Publisher: Univ. of North Carolina
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Tisdale (Stepping Westward, 1991, etc.) leads an enthusiastic amateur's tour through sex in America (with a few brief forays abroad). In an inviting expansion of her controversial 1992 Harper's magazine essay of the same title, Tisdale offers a trek through sexual inhibitions, expressions, assumptions, and questions (for instance, if everyone thinks about sex so much, why do so few feel comfortable discussing it?), arriving at an increasingly fashionable pro-sex feminism. Americans are so conflicted about sex, she says, because they're caught endlessly between obsession and avoidance. Tisdale, fighting avoidance, confronts the subject head on. She checks out sex clubs, sex toy stores, pornography shops, and erotic novels, citing everyone from Roland Barthes to Susie Bright. Ancient Greece, the story of Adam and Eve, Freud, Jesse Helms, and Basic Instinct convince her that we're a nation of guilty prudes, arrested adolescents who can't sate our lust for adult material. We're ``sex drenched and sex phobic.'' Tisdale indicates that the fear starts with men, but that women can help fix it. ``Women guiding the sexual drive of men changes them, gentles the institutions men have made to cope with their feelings toward women.'' One area she sees women reinventing is pornography. The chapter on this subject is by far the most controversial and at times tedious. Coming down hard on anti-porn feminists like Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin (even more than on the Religious Right), she argues for tolerance and maintains that the heterosexual nuclear family, reproductive legislation, and patriarchal society in general are likely to do more damage to women than any X-rated films. Finally, she reaches the unoriginal but hopeful point that sexual freedom contains the seeds of significant social change. ``The center will not hold...if radical sexuality works.'' Just about everything you always wanted to know about sex but were afraid to ask. Fluidly written, sexy, probing, personally revealing, and wise.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-385-46854-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1994
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