Overlong but intermittently fascinating behind-the-scenes look at one of punk’s most unlikely icons.
The late Joey Ramone is feted with tough love in these cradle-to-grave memories from his kid brother Mickey Leigh (born Mitch Hyman).
In Leigh’s collaboration with longtime punk journalist McNeil (co-author: The Other Hollywood: The Uncensored Oral History of the Porn Film Industry, 2005, etc.), Joey Ramone (born Jeff Hyman) is the classic middle-class misfit whose salvation came in the rock ’n’ roll teen culture of the late 1960s. Growing up in suburban Forest Hills, N.Y., Leigh witnessed his sickly, awkward OCD brother transform from a freakish, sometimes violent kid to a moon-booted glam-rocker known as “Jeff Starship.” In the early ’70s Jeff transformed again—into Joey Ramone, the charismatic Ramones frontman and punk-rock heartthrob. Although Leigh planned to pursue his own dreams of rock stardom, initially he settled for being the Ramones’ underpaid roadie. From this vantage point he saw the band’s rise to international cult stardom through New York City’s fledgling CBGB punk scene. He also experienced firsthand the Ramones’ perpetually dysfunctional, dark netherworld governed by the near-psychotic dictatorial ways of guitar player Johnny Ramone. Frustrated and broke, Leigh eventually cut his professional ties with the Ramones and pursued a series of dead-end musical and occupational activities. When the author focuses on his own uphill battles, the memoir hits occasional snags. He hit up Joey for residual money for his backup vocals on the Ramones’ “Blitzkrieg Bop”—used in a 1991 Budweiser commercial—and had constant feuds with his brother about songwriting credit on their several musical collaborations. This belated demand for money and recognition seems somewhat hypocritical, especially considering Leigh had previously been determined to stake out his own identity apart from the Ramones. Nevertheless, Leigh showed dogged persistence in the face of constant futility. Sadly, though, it took Joey’s losing bout with cancer to fully reconcile the two brothers’ differences and bring them together again.
Overlong but intermittently fascinating behind-the-scenes look at one of punk’s most unlikely icons.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-7432-5216-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2009
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
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