by Tony Fletcher ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 1999
An exhaustive look at the short life of the Who’s legendary drummer. Fletcher follows Keith Moon from his childhood in the London suburb of Wembley through his apprenticeship in the Beachcombers, his 15-year tenure in the Who, and his death by overdose at the age of 32. The writer’s principal task seems to be to dispense with the apocryphal stories that surrounded Moon’s wild life. We learn, for instance, that Moon never drove a Rolls-Royce into a swimming pool (actually, while drunk, he accidentally backed the Rolls into a small pond on his property). In clarifying the record, however, Fletcher paints a vividly ugly picture of Moon as wife-beater, drunk driver, and all-out pathetic drunkard. Unfortunately, Fletcher is first and foremost a fan, and his desire not to paint too dreadful a picture of Moon leads to pleading many, many excuses for his infantile behavior, including a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder, when it seems quite clear that drugs and particularly alcohol lay at the bottom of most of Moon’s problems. Still, the musical aspects of the biography are well done; here, in tying Moon’s own story closely to the Who’s, Fletcher is at his strongest. The author conducted a broad range of interviews with industry friends and associates of Moon’s, not the least of them Who bassist John Entwistle. And Fletcher’s presentation of the Who as one of the few bands able to stand the test of time with their integrity intact is notably persuasive. When Fletcher follows Moon to his exile in California during the mid-1970s, he loses the anchor of the Who’s career, and the work suffers. Episodes regarding Moon’s abortive career as a comic actor only partially redeem these portions of it. Few questions will now remain about Moon’s life—in fact, you may know more than you wanted to. (24 pages photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Feb. 6, 1999
ISBN: 0-380-97337-5
Page Count: 632
Publisher: Avon/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1998
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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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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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