A compact and conversant history that makes the story new again, capturing the Rolling Stones in all their Faustian glory.
A funny, personal, and professional history of the Rolling Stones.
The facts are well-known and have been reported ad nauseam: English poor boys (except for Mick Jagger) form blues band, forsake modest ambition for global domination, soar to immortality on the strength of great songs and classic albums, enjoy enough highs (girls, cars, mansions, drugs) to weather the lows (busts, divorce, addiction, death), and are still going at it, a chugging machine as indestructible as it is increasingly irrelevant. So what does longtime journalist and author Cohen (Monsters: The 1985 Chicago Bears and the Wild Heart of Football, 2013, etc.) bring to this sodden, sordid tale? The passion and disappointment of a fan who knows (and reports) the facts but can’t stop cherishing the myth. As a writer for Rolling Stone, Cohen toured with the band and got close to them, and he seems to have read every single book about the subject; by his own admission, he has studied the Stones “as the ancients studied war. It’s my Hemingway, Dickens, Homer.” Cohen weaves together the peak events with a supple sense of the band’s inner dynamic and unbreakable bonds, and he captures their public and private evolution—whether it’s the way producer Andrew Loog Oldham ratcheted up the band’s hoodlum mystique or how Jagger and Keith Richards mapped out a strategy for long-term success, which ultimately meant wresting control from founder Brian Jones, thus setting in motion the latter’s demise. Cohen sees them up close, such as when he describes Richards literally convulsing his way to sobriety, and far. Here is his succinct overview of the band’s 1969 Altamont disaster: “Mick Jagger had long pretended to be the devil. Then one night he threw a party and the real devil showed up.”
A compact and conversant history that makes the story new again, capturing the Rolling Stones in all their Faustian glory.Pub Date: May 10, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8041-7923-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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