A refreshingly frank and free-spirited memoir from a feminist icon.
The Grammy-winning artist recounts the eventful story of her life as a musician and feminist political activist.
The daughter of an architect mother and an engineer father, DiFranco grew up in 1970s Buffalo as a cheerfully independent misfit who loved horses and poetry. After her brother was hospitalized for psychiatric issues, she shifted her attention to dancing and music. She learned to play guitar from a colorful public school artist-in-residence named Michael and came to realize that music “brought me deeper and deeper into the world” in a way that dancing did not. When her mother left the family, DiFranco followed her but then left to strike out on her own as an emancipated teenager, sleeping in bus stations, gigging with Michael, and working to finish high school early. Then she moved to New York and, at age 18, started selling tapes of what became her eponymous debut album. DiFranco also began a long, complex relationship with Scot Fisher, who helped her manage her newly founded label, Righteous Babe Records. In between playing clubs and festivals at home and abroad, DiFranco took classes at the New School for Social Research, discovered feminism, and began experimenting with bisexual polyamory. Her commitment to left-wing political activism also blossomed, and she engaged in protests against the first Gulf War and American intervention in El Salvador. By the mid-1990s, DiFranco moved out of the hardscrabble underground scene and into the mainstream, which now recognized her as a major talent and successful entrepreneur. Marriage to her sound engineer and tours around the world followed. Yet in the midst of triumph, she still felt “utterly alone.” Like post–9/11 America, she would endure several “years of flailing” along an uncertain path. Interspersed throughout with feminist/political musings and anecdotes about such music legends as Pete Seeger, Prince, and Bob Dylan, DiFranco’s tale celebrates both independent music and an unconventional life daringly lived.
A refreshingly frank and free-spirited memoir from a feminist icon.Pub Date: May 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-7352-2517-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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