Bowen, a man who made millions of dollars, and seemingly as many enemies, with his ruthless management style (Jerry Lee Lewis purportedly wanted to kill him), describes his life in this candid, if self-aggrandizing, autobiography. Bowen is best known for his role in facilitating the recent resurgence of country music. He started his career as a bass player but quickly found greater success as a producer, working with Frank Sinatra and his ``Rat Pack.'' He displayed what was to become his signature manic drive when he created a hit for Sinatra out of ``Strangers in the Night,'' a song that had already been recorded by another singer and was about to land in stores. Bowen recorded, pressed, and delivered Sinatra's version within a nerve-wracking 24 hours, beat out the competition, and gave Sinatra's career a major mid-1960s boost. Ambition (and a perpetual yearning for new challenges) drove Bowen from one record label to another. He was almost always successful, sometimes spectacularly so. He managed six Nashville divisions—including those of Warner and MCA—in just over a decade. Whenever he took over a label, he would fire and replace much of the staff, update recording techniques (he was an early proponent of digital recording technology), and encourage artists to take responsibility for the direction and production of their music. The book provides wonderful flashes of music history throughout, including Bowen's shrewd assessments of the sprawling, frantic music business and of major rock and country singers. Country music fans will also find interest in the measured jabs aimed at Bowen's business nemesis, Garth Brooks, one of country's biggest stars. Though an unauthorized biography might be more revealing, Bowen is honest enough with his audience to scare: It's like watching a Great White from inside a shark cage—readers will be fascinated, but happy they aren't closer. (8 pages photos, not seen)
Pub Date: May 5, 1997
ISBN: 0-684-80764-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1997
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
