Buckley fans will be pleased by the fruits of Browne’s hungry research—but others may be left to wonder what all the fuss...
A furiously detailed, deeply smitten biography of father and son musicians Tim and Jeff Buckley, from Entertainment Weekly music critic Browne.
Tim Buckley was a 1960s musician who blended folk, jazz, art song, and rhythm and blues with “a tenor as clear and untainted as Irish air.” He attained cult status but was too gratingly experimental to capture a wide audience. That he was self-obsessed and obnoxious—“No, I don’t play that anymore. If you don’t like it, get the hell out of here,” he would suggest to old fans—didn’t help either. Though Browne is clearly taken with Tim’s music, he doesn’t try to buff his rotten behavior, or tidy up his neglect of abandoned son Jeff. Jeff also turned to music, partly as a way to get free from a miserable home life, Browne suggests, and he was just as wide-ranging as his father and had a voice “as big as a cathedral.” While the father played the failed, misunderstood artist, the son cultivated the look of “a sullen male chanteuse who sang as if he were older, wiser, and more heartbroken than he appeared.” Reading here, it is very hard to get a sense of why these two men so absorb Browne when they come across as ditsy and irresponsible: Tim willful to the point of bitterness and Jeff waffling and erratic. Browne’s music critiques are flabby (of Jeff’s one album: “Grace seemed to float above the earth, scouring the landscape for spiritual fulfillment”) and the details can overwhelm (is it important that Jeff briefly rented a house with a red stucco roof?). That father and son died young is tragic, but doesn’t add up to a compelling story.
Buckley fans will be pleased by the fruits of Browne’s hungry research—but others may be left to wonder what all the fuss was about.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-06-107608-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: HarperEntertainment
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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