A disorganized guide but with enough information for readers to cherry-pick the most useful tips.
Kelly offers a handbook for music-makers that covers an impressive breadth of topics.
The author is clearly an accomplished musician, which comes across in a quick glance at the several-pages-long table of contents, which is full of multiple headings and subheadings. The book includes sections on such topics as sound equipment, managers, goals, copyrights, unions, and different types of jobs that musicians can undertake. There are also tangential chapters, including “Personal Subjects,” which cover family, friends, and vices. Everything a musician would need to consider is on this list. However, the information in the book itself is poorly organized. The book starts with “The Value of An Education,” discussing different options for musicians to learn their craft. It’s not a bad place to start, but Kelly doesn’t define his audience first—what type and skill level of musician he’s addressing, or what their goals might be. Is the information intended for a basement-rock drummer or a hopeful professional session guitarist or a clarinetist looking to join a major orchestra? As a result, the book starts off-kilter. Some of the book’s advice seems like mere platitudes; a chapter called “Internal Resonance,” for example, addresses the more soulful aspects of being a player, and the first three subheadings are “Believe in Yourself,” “Self-Resilience,” and “Do It on Your Own.” These seem to say similar things in different ways, and sometimes unclearly: “By not behaving obsequiously and using ploys to get a job can also be refreshing and spiritually fulfilling.” There is some good advice in the book, as when the author counsels musicians to make contacts with people who work as sidemen for bigger artists, whom he calls “some of the most important people one can get to know….One can go from a fan to a peer.” He also helpfully offers the addresses of websites where one can find examples of effective resumes. Overall, the book offers to assist musicians who are looking to navigate a confusing and intimidating business. However, the book itself is often hard to navigate.
A disorganized guide but with enough information for readers to cherry-pick the most useful tips.Pub Date: March 16, 2015
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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