A biography of a reticent musician that will allow even his biggest fans to see him with fresh eyes and hear him with fresh ears.
Zanes (Revolutions in Sound: Warner Bros. Records: The First Fifty Years, 2009, etc.) plainly sympathizes with the plight of his subject, an artist who held his band together through decades, tensions, drug addictions, personnel shifts, and solo albums (that often fared better commercially than Petty’s work with his long-standing and much acclaimed band, the Heartbreakers). The author’s own band, the Del Fuegos, even toured with Petty’s, so he’s had personal experience from a couple of perspectives on “the point of the tour when one could hate the sound of the next man’s breathing.” But it was the author’s book on Dusty Springfield that captured Petty’s interest and apparently gained him access to nearly everyone who might present a well-rounded story of an artistically ambitious rocker, one who persevered despite considerable odds and adversity. Zanes also understands how talented musicians in a supporting role (that gives them a lesser financial share than their leader) might feel stifled serving his vision and betrayed by his solo projects and collaborations with outsiders. The narrative climaxes with Petty divorcing, falling in love, becoming addicted to heroin, mourning the deaths of parents and a band mate, isolated from the rest of the Heartbreakers, and suffering from clinical depression so severe he could hardly leave his bed. Zanes brings a depth and empathy to the narrative that never veers toward sensationalism. He also shows how and why Petty became George Harrison’s closest friend, how the band found itself working with both Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash, and how Petty has found fulfillment within the delicate balances of his life.
Though it attests to the artist’s singularity, this incisive, illuminating biography also serves as an elegy to one of the golden eras of the classic rock band—of the days when “a band was everything, a shield and a shelter.”Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9968-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 9, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
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The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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