As drug-crazed, booze-swilling megalomaniacs go, Yetnikoff makes excellent company.
Yetnikoff, head of CBS Records Group from the mid-’70s through the ’80s, looks back on his addled joyride at the top of the American music business.
During his tenure, when he ruled at the biggest record label in the US, Yetnikoff was considered an unholy terror, a loose cannon, and the most unpredictable of music powerbrokers. This brisk, uncensored, and often hilarious tragicomic memoir tells how Yetnikoff plunged from the apex of his profession to the cellar riding a tidal wave of alcohol through a blizzard of cocaine. The story moves swiftly from his youth in an abusive Brooklyn household of Polish Jews to his rapid ascent in the business affairs department at CBS Records. He took the helm at CBS’s music division in 1975, and he gives a shpritzing account of the no-holds-barred reign that ended with his ouster in 1989. Blotto from a constant intake of coke and vodka and incessant womanizing, Yetnikoff careened from one outrageous encounter to another as he racked up hit after hit. He offers recollections of in-your-face confrontations with such players as Clive Davis, David Geffen, mega-attorney Allen Grubman, his label successor Tommy Mottola, and his bête noir, CBS honcho Lawrence Tisch, as well as Norio Ohga and Akio Morita of Sony Corp., which purchased CBS Records in the late ’80s. There are also amusing anecdotes about the care and feeding of superstars like Michael Jackson, Barbra Streisand, Bruce Springsteen, and Paul Simon. These bile-spewing stories are so funny that it’s almost possible to forgive Yetnikoff such lapses as his ingenuous apologies for the payola abuses of independent promotion men. The author winds down after his expulsion from the majors; he gravely details his route to sobriety through his commitment to 12-step work. It’s an all-too-familiar penitent wrap-up to a highly entertaining account of life in the music industry at the height of its glamour and excess.
As drug-crazed, booze-swilling megalomaniacs go, Yetnikoff makes excellent company.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-7679-1536-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2003
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 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.
