PositiveLos Angeles Review of Books... an absorbing, witty, often deliciously biting read, as all rock memoirs should be. But instead of the usual tale of rags to debauched fame and wealth, Thompson presents an altogether more arduous trajectory, from outward middle-class respectability (his father was a detective with London’s Metropolitan Police) to the strikingly precarious life of an itinerant young musician living hand to mouth for years and encountering more than his share of existential absurdity and loss ... Thompson is an engaging prose stylist, as observant and wide-ranging on the page as he is in his songs, and he graces his stories with a sparkling wit familiar to audiences from his stage banter ... He certainly doesn’t shy away from the dark corners and lurking demons, but he does so with the lightest of touches ... Some of the silences, though, are frustrating. I would have welcomed much more on his spiritual crisis and how he pulled himself out of it. I also would have liked to read a lot more about his relationship with the guitar and how he expanded his range and technique. Like a guest at an English dinner party, Thompson appears at times to be overly anxious not to bore the assembled company and stops short when he should have more faith that we are in fact hanging on his every word.
Dave Cullen
MixedLos Angeles Review of Books\"Dave Cullen\'s Parkland is a book published too soon. Which is another way of saying it is not the book it wants to be ... Cullen does a creditable job of giving us the backstory to these developments: who the main students leaders were before the shootings, what galvanized them into action, how they found their focus and their energy ... Many of [Cullen\'s] arguments — that Parkland was different; that the endless Sisyphean cycle of violence, outrage, and ultimate inaction is at last being broken; that a new generation of activism is overturning received wisdom about the intractability of the United States’s deadly gun culture — look wildly premature if not hollow. And that, in turn, raises basic questions about Cullen’s ability to do what readers should reasonably expect from any author steeped in his subject: to guide them through the thicket of personalities and issues and conflicts, with which they most likely have some familiarity already, and give a sense of what matters and what does not. On that score, Cullen flounders badly and repeatedly ... Cullen spends no time with opponents of new gun legislation, so they remain nebulous, two-dimensional villains whose motives are simply assumed to be bad.\
