Though it attests to the artist’s singularity, this incisive, illuminating biography also serves as an elegy to one of the...
A biography of a reticent musician that will allow even his biggest fans to see him with fresh eyes and hear him with fresh ears.
Zanes (Revolutions in Sound: Warner Bros. Records: The First Fifty Years, 2009, etc.) plainly sympathizes with the plight of his subject, an artist who held his band together through decades, tensions, drug addictions, personnel shifts, and solo albums (that often fared better commercially than Petty’s work with his long-standing and much acclaimed band, the Heartbreakers). The author’s own band, the Del Fuegos, even toured with Petty’s, so he’s had personal experience from a couple of perspectives on “the point of the tour when one could hate the sound of the next man’s breathing.” But it was the author’s book on Dusty Springfield that captured Petty’s interest and apparently gained him access to nearly everyone who might present a well-rounded story of an artistically ambitious rocker, one who persevered despite considerable odds and adversity. Zanes also understands how talented musicians in a supporting role (that gives them a lesser financial share than their leader) might feel stifled serving his vision and betrayed by his solo projects and collaborations with outsiders. The narrative climaxes with Petty divorcing, falling in love, becoming addicted to heroin, mourning the deaths of parents and a band mate, isolated from the rest of the Heartbreakers, and suffering from clinical depression so severe he could hardly leave his bed. Zanes brings a depth and empathy to the narrative that never veers toward sensationalism. He also shows how and why Petty became George Harrison’s closest friend, how the band found itself working with both Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash, and how Petty has found fulfillment within the delicate balances of his life.
Though it attests to the artist’s singularity, this incisive, illuminating biography also serves as an elegy to one of the golden eras of the classic rock band—of the days when “a band was everything, a shield and a shelter.”Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9968-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 8, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
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
© 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.
