“The audience expects to be entertained 100 percent for their ticket dollar,” Rogers writes. This doesn’t really hit that...
Unassuming memoir by one-time chartbuster Rogers, he of “The Gambler” fame.
The author’s approach to memoir writing is consonant with his approach to song crafting and chicken making: crowd-pleasing, unchallenging and resolutely middle-of-the-road. Some might call it bland, but it’s calculated not to offend. A child of hardscrabble East Texas, Rogers doesn’t dig too deeply to find the well of the past; “I can’t say for sure,” he writes, “but I just took it for granted that I was part Irish, part Indian, and that was that.” A talent for singing and playing guitar brought him early into professional music, and he got his first hit with a psychedelic-lite version of Mickey Newbury’s “Just Dropped In,” refreshed on the hip-o-meter when given a standout moment in The Big Lebowski. Though shot through with show-business anecdotes, Rogers’ narrative doesn’t dish much dirt; when he tells a joke, refreshingly, it’s most often about himself, as when he mangled an expensive amplifier early on in his career: “We didn’t have the heart to confess how truly stupid Mickey [Jones] and I were, so we did the next most honorable thing. We blamed the airlines.” Neither does Rogers dig too hard into the touchier parts of his past, mentioning numerous ex-wives only in passing. The refrain, “What in the world were you thinking, Kenneth Ray?” runs throughout, but rarely does he stop to really turn the question over—though he does let us know why he never cozied up to drugs, for which, and for all the general mayhem that Rogers doesn’t chronicle, please consult Keith Richards’ Life.
“The audience expects to be entertained 100 percent for their ticket dollar,” Rogers writes. This doesn’t really hit that 100 percent mark, but it’s a light and pleasant read all the same.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-06-207181-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 9, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
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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