Whatever’s missing (including more context of how popular music was changing while her own music was changing), what’s here...
A personable and engagingly written memoir, though reticent and short on personal revelation.
The subtitle reinforces the focus, but even readers who don’t want to wallow in gossip might be expecting more than, “I was keeping company with then-governor Jerry Brown” and, “I was keeping steady company with journalist Pete Hamill,” without any context about how these and other relationships began or developed. The epilogue begins, “I live these days with my two children,” which is the first mention of them. Yet for those content with an illumination of the artist’s musical eclecticism, and what music means to her, the book is informative and heartfelt. It suggests (without the singer ever belaboring the point) that Ronstadt deserves more credit than she often receives for popularizing country rock, for taking the then-daring but now commonplace initiative to interpret the pre-rock Great American Songbook, to follow her instincts wherever they might lead her, from The Pirates of Penzance to traditional Mexican mariachi. “I never felt that rock and roll defined me,” she writes. “There was an unyielding attitude that came with the music that involved being confrontational, dismissive, and aggressive—or, as my mother would say, ungracious.” She also explains, “I felt some stagnation setting in, and the relentless touring and endless repetition of the same songs over and over again promoted a creeping awareness that my music had begun to sound like my washing machine….I was beginning to feel miserable. And trapped.” So she made choices that others considered unwise, or at least noncommercial, and reaped all sorts of rewards.
Whatever’s missing (including more context of how popular music was changing while her own music was changing), what’s here is consistently interesting.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4516-6872-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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 standout immigrant coming-of-age story.
In her first nonfiction book, novelist Grande (Dancing with Butterflies, 2009, etc.) delves into her family’s cycle of separation and reunification.
Raised in poverty so severe that spaghetti reminded her of the tapeworms endemic to children in her Mexican hometown, the author is her family’s only college graduate and writer, whose honors include an American Book Award and International Latino Book Award. Though she was too young to remember her father when he entered the United States illegally seeking money to improve life for his family, she idolized him from afar. However, she also blamed him for taking away her mother after he sent for her when the author was not yet 5 years old. Though she emulated her sister, she ultimately answered to herself, and both siblings constantly sought affirmation of their parents’ love, whether they were present or not. When one caused disappointment, the siblings focused their hopes on the other. These contradictions prove to be the narrator’s hallmarks, as she consistently displays a fierce willingness to ask tough questions, accept startling answers, and candidly render emotional and physical violence. Even as a girl, Grande understood the redemptive power of language to define—in the U.S., her name’s literal translation, “big queen,” led to ridicule from other children—and to complicate. In spelling class, when a teacher used the sentence “my mamá loves me” (mi mamá me ama), Grande decided to “rearrange the words so that they formed a question: ¿Me ama mi mamá? Does my mama love me?”
A standout immigrant coming-of-age story.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-6177-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
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BOOK REVIEW
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