Amiable but with an edge, and good reading for Nelson’s legion of followers.
The beloved outlaw country icon rolls a fat one for his fans and sits down on the porch to spin a few yarns.
Those fat ones are legion in this book, whether in the company of the superbly suave Julio Iglesias or out on the road taking it to The Man. Still, Nelson (Roll Me Up and Smoke Me When I Die, 2012, etc.) opens on an oddly dark note, first conjuring up and analyzing T.S. Eliot and then brooding on his infamous woes with the IRS a quarter-century ago. The author has much more to brood about besides that sorry episode, from the life course–transforming death of family early on to the demise of nearly all of his contemporaries. Yet he’s nothing if not a survivor, accustomed to dusting himself off and going back into battle: “Because I was small, I got the shit kicked out of me. Wound up with a broken nose and busted collarbone, but nothing stopped me….The minute I healed up, I was back out there.” Those battles, too, are many and storied, involving not just the IRS but also the whole of the Nashville establishment; Nelson has found allies in the likes of Ernest Tubb, Johnny Cash, and Chet Atkins. The last counseled, “Be patient, Willie, and you’ll get the mainstream audience you’ve been looking for”—and so Willie was, and so he did. The narrative is sometimes choppy, with staccato one-sentence paragraphs going on for long stretches like an endless jam on “Whiskey River,” and it’s often repetitive, as if—well, as if Nelson maybe rolled one too many before hitting the typewriter. Still, if the stories are familiar, and if we’ve heard them before, he still has much new to say on issues such as privacy, the changing music scene, and, of course, legalization (“I owe marijuana a lot”).
Amiable but with an edge, and good reading for Nelson’s legion of followers.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-316-33931-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2015
SEEN & HEARD
An eye-opening glimpse into the attempted self-unmaking of one of Hollywood’s most recognizable talents.
The debut memoir from the pop and fashion star.
Early on, Simpson describes the book she didn’t write: “a motivational manual telling you how to live your best life.” Though having committed to the lucrative deal years before, she “walked away,” fearing any sort of self-help advice she might give would be hypocritical. Outwardly, Simpson was at the peak of her success, with her fashion line generating “one billion dollars in annual sales.” However, anxiety was getting the better of her, and she admits she’d become a “feelings addict,” just needing “enough noise to distract me from the pain I’d been avoiding since childhood. The demons of traumatic abuse that refused to let me sleep at night—Tylenol PM at age twelve, red wine and Ambien as a grown, scared woman. Those same demons who perched on my shoulder, and when they saw a man as dark as them, leaned in to my ear to whisper, ‘Just give him your light. See if it saves him…’ ” On Halloween 2017, Simpson hit rock bottom, and, with the intervention of her devoted friends and husband, began to address her addictions and underlying fears. In this readable but overlong narrative, the author traces her childhood as a Baptist preacher’s daughter moving 18 times before she “hit fifth grade,” and follows her remarkable rise to fame as a singer. She reveals the psychological trauma resulting from years of sexual abuse by a family friend, experiences that drew her repeatedly into bad relationships with men, most publicly with ex-husband Nick Lachey. Admitting that she was attracted to the validating power of an audience, Simpson analyzes how her failings and triumphs have enabled her to take control of her life, even as she was hounded by the press and various music and movie executives about her weight. Simpson’s memoir contains plenty of personal and professional moments for fans to savor. One of Kirkus and Rolling Stone’s Best Music Books of 2020.
An eye-opening glimpse into the attempted self-unmaking of one of Hollywood’s most recognizable talents.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-289996-5
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
An educational and inspiring biography of seminal American innovators.
A charmingly pared-down life of the “boys” that grounds their dream of flight in decent character and work ethic.
There is a quiet, stoical awe to the accomplishments of these two unprepossessing Ohio brothers in this fluently rendered, skillfully focused study by two-time Pulitzer Prize–winning and two-time National Book Award–winning historian McCullough (The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris, 2011, etc.). The author begins with a brief yet lively depiction of the Wright home dynamic: reeling from the death of their mother from tuberculosis in 1889, the three children at home, Wilbur, Orville, and Katharine, had to tend house, as their father, an itinerant preacher, was frequently absent. McCullough highlights the intellectual stimulation that fed these bookish, creative, close-knit siblings. Wilbur was the most gifted, yet his parents’ dreams of Yale fizzled after a hockey accident left the boy with a mangled jaw and broken teeth. The boys first exhibited their mechanical genius in their print shop and then in their bicycle shop, which allowed them the income and space upstairs for machine-shop invention. Dreams of flight were reawakened by reading accounts by Otto Lilienthal and other learned treatises and, specifically, watching how birds flew. Wilbur’s dogged writing to experts such as civil engineer Octave Chanute and the Smithsonian Institute provided advice and response, as others had long been preoccupied by controlled flight. Testing their first experimental glider took the Wrights over several seasons to Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, to experiment with their “wing warping” methods. There, the strange, isolated locals marveled at these most “workingest boys,” and the brothers continually reworked and repaired at every step. McCullough marvels at their success despite a lack of college education, technical training, “friends in high places” or “financial backers”—they were just boys obsessed by a dream and determined to make it reality.
An educational and inspiring biography of seminal American innovators.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4767-2874-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
IN THE NEWS
PERSPECTIVES
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