by Tom Jones ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 24, 2015
A remarkable memoir by a remarkable artist.
The memoir of the resilient career of a singer who knows how closely he succumbed to self-parody.
Jones knows how most people think of him: “Tom Jones: panty magnet.” With a tone that suggests that he never takes himself too seriously but knows that he deserves to be taken more seriously as an artist, he relates how the ritual started with one uninhibited female fan and how he instinctively wiped the sweat from his brow and handed them back to her. Thus began a ritual that would become more the focus of a Tom Jones show than the music, with countless women bringing along an extra pair of underwear just to toss. From his days as the teenage son of a Welsh coal miner, Tommy Woodward—later “Twisting Tommy Scott” before settling on the stage name he would ride to fame—knew that he had a powerful voice and that there was an animal magnetism to his presence, though occasionally he found himself the prey of men who could do something for him but wanted something back. He was a huge fan of Jerry Lee Lewis (on whose album he first heard “Green, Green Grass of Home”) and thought Elvis Presley was comparatively contrived. But though he had the voice and soul of a rocker, his career path ended up taking him through the theater circuit and TV, with novelty numbers like, “What’s New Pussycat?” Though he’s not in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, he claims, “there’s more rock ’n’ roll in me than there is in 90%” of those in there. In attitude and anecdote, his engaging and illuminating book backs him up. Perhaps most impressive is the love story with the woman he married almost 60 years ago—after a teenage pregnancy—and the artistic command he has shown in recent years, since he stopped dyeing his hair and started paying more attention to the quality of his material than its pelvis-thrusting potential.
A remarkable memoir by a remarkable artist.Pub Date: Nov. 24, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-59240-961-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Blue Rider Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
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by Tom Jones
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
BOOK REVIEW
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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