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 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
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