Just the thing for fans of punk—and of its heroines, too.
Guitar hero and world-weary survivor Albertine turns in a thoughtful, delightfully written memoir of the days of punky yore.
The title owes to the author’s long-suffering mother, who lamented, in the glitter-and-glam days that preceded punk, that all her daughter cared about was fashion, rock and lads. As she turns 60, Albertine shows no signs of diminishing interest in any of those things, though she’s decidedly had enough of being told what to do and, more to the point, what girls can’t do: namely, play rock music along with the boys. Having done service for years as the guitarist for The Slits (not her first choice of names, she allows), Albertine, like her erstwhile boyfriend Mick Jones, revels in broad and eclectic musical tastes, but the one-two-three-four blasts of three chords and 1977 clearly command her allegiance. In celebrating that music, Albertine is sometimes bittersweet, for many of her comrades have since fallen, including Ari Up, Poly Styrene and Malcolm McLaren, who’s treated more kindly than in many other accounts. When the music ended, Albertine retreated into a marriage that became loveless and frustrating over its long course; she also survived motherhood and cancer. Throughout it all, she has resisted being told that she can’t do anything she wishes to, including write: “My so-called ‘manager,’ who in all the six months he’s been ‘managing’ me has never once come to one of my gigs, is now telling me that I’m a shit writer and can’t write a book about my own life.” We’re glad to tell the manager that he was wrong about the writing (and should have come to the gigs, too), for Albertine’s book belongs alongside the work of Jon Savage and Caroline Coon as a primary document of an explosive time in British music and British culture generally.
Just the thing for fans of punk—and of its heroines, too.Pub Date: Nov. 25, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-250-06599-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 11, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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