by Tom Doyle ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 17, 2014
McCartney emerges as more admirable than many readers might have imagined—and more human, too. They’ll want to give his...
A close-up study of Paul McCartney’s first post-Beatles decade.
It’s one measure of how messed-up the music business is and of how competitive the former band mates were that John Lennon lamented, in the 1970s, that McCartney had amassed a $25 million fortune, much more than Lennon had. Lennon’s pile would quickly grow, though he would not live long enough to enjoy it all, thanks in part to the battery of lawsuits that McCartney fired off to get out of bad deals that the Beatles had signed over the years. By Q magazine contributing editor Doyle’s (The Glamour Chase: Maverick Life of Billy MacKenzie, 1998) account, McCartney left the Beatles bruised and bleeding—and with a penchant not just for a little of the grass he wrote of in “Get Back,” but also for countless bottles of whiskey. His depression cleared and his spirits improved when, holed up on his Scottish farm, he hatched the band that would become Wings, complete with wife Linda as keyboardist and vocalist—even though, as observers were quick to note, she couldn’t quite sing or play. Finding plenty of good to write about Linda all the same, Doyle looks behind the chipper, thumbs-up McCartney to find the complex personality beneath the image: He was an extraordinary musician beset by self-doubt, a countercultural hippie who also had a gift for square-jawed business. (His net worth is estimated at more than $1 billion.) Doyle’s asides are puzzling at times—the McCartneys were famously vegetarian, but he has them enjoying “hot biscuits and country ham”—but he manages to say something new about a public figure about whom countless thousands of books and articles have been written, and he says it well.
McCartney emerges as more admirable than many readers might have imagined—and more human, too. They’ll want to give his albums of the ’70s a fresh spin as well.Pub Date: June 17, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8041-7914-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014
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by Tom Doyle
by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006
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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