by Tom Ryerson ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 2017
A bloated, rambling, but often piquant portrait of a misfiring micromogul.
The struggles of an independent record label illuminate an obscure, seedy corner of Canadian country music in the 1970s in this sprawling show-business biography.
Ryerson follows “Big Jim” Allison through his colorful but not exactly inspiring career as a guitarist and band leader in Brant County, Ontario’s country-music scene, and the owner of Thunderbird Recordings during its brief existence from 1975 to 1979. His is largely a saga of failure: Although a few records that he produced charted in Canada, his biggest moneymaker was a municipal song celebrating the city of Brantford, Ontario’s centennial, and the label steadily lost money and acts until it folded due to debt. It wasn’t a noble failure, either, with Thunderbird displaying typical recording-industry frauds, writ small. Allison exploited artists by overcharging them for productions and lying about royalties, and he faked recording dates to thwart a copyright lawsuit. Ryerson’s portrayal of Allison is less as a villain than as a sad sack, though: He was willing to prey on smaller fish, but he was unable to profit from it because he lacked the instincts of a music-biz shark. In the end, with his label defunct and his wife dying of diabetes, he’s a figure of pathos. Ryerson (Return to Castle Lake, 2013, etc.) embellishes facts with imagined scenes to keep things “interesting,” but with only intermittent success. His writing often bogs down in the minutiae of gigs and recording sessions, and after Big Jim himself drops out, the narrative drags on with biographical sketches and chronicles of numerous others connected with Thunderbird, formatted in snippets that read like an entertainment calendar (such as “On May 31st 1980 Ramblin’ Fever played at Roger Quick’s 3rd Jamboree in the Stix at Thedford Arena”). But amid the thickets of factoids there are entertaining scenes of working-class country musicians in sleazy bars, drinking, vomiting, and urinating on stage; of the 630-pound Allison accidentally crushing a Chihuahua by sitting on it; and of him crashing through stage floorboards. Country fans will find these atmospheric vignettes to be a hoot.
A bloated, rambling, but often piquant portrait of a misfiring micromogul.Pub Date: July 1, 2017
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 437
Publisher: Mouton Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
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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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