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Recent Reviews
Kathleen Hanna
Positive The New York Times Book Review Unfolds in raw, ragged segments. She has always explored difficult subjects, but without the music’s cathartic power and her commanding stage presence, the book can be dark ... Her story, along with Bikini Kill’s upcoming tour, couldn’t feel more necessary.
Dorothy Carvello
Positive The New York Times Anything for a Hit: An A&R Woman’s Story of Surviving the Music Industry goes a long way toward explaining the culture of misogyny that, at best, looked the other way as women were mistreated and, at worst, cultivated abuse ... One thing missing from this memoir, which could provide some light in all the darkness and strengthen our trust in the narrator, is music. Carvello never shows any sense of wonder at hearing a great song or discovering a beautiful voice. Her greatest claim to fame as a woman who has spent most of her career scouting talent is bringing the hair metal band Skid Row to Atlantic. O.K., that and her affair with the INXS singer Michael Hutchence. Having good ears is essential to A&R; Carvello’s book convinces me she has good eyes.
Tina Turner
Positive The New York Times Book Review \"That Turner’s story is an archetype doesn’t make it any less true, or harrowing ... Unlike I, Tina, which was written with the journalist (and former MTV News anchor) Kurt Loder using a sort of Rashomon chorus of voices, My Love Story is told entirely from Turner’s point of view with the help of the co-authors Deborah Davis and Dominik Wichmann ... Turner, who has been a committed Buddhist for decades, comes off as neither sensationalistic nor self-serving. My Love Story doesn’t carry the literary value that Loder’s historic descriptions provided, but for a famous sex symbol who has turned a tragedy into a fairy tale, Turner is charmingly down to earth ... One question goes unanswered in both of Turner’s books. Many people must have known what was happening between Ike and Tina, who frequently had black eyes and visible bruises. Did no one intervene? Why did record labels, promoters and performers tolerate seeing a talent clearly and repeatedly abused?\
Bruce Springsteen
Positive The Los Angeles Review of Books Born To Run surprises and compels. Its author reveals a psychological depth and vulnerability that is brave for a star of his magnitude ... He understands the demons that bedevil American culture not merely as an empathic fellow traveler, but on an intimate, lived level. When it comes to issues of race and gender, Bruce sometimes stumbles on the page, but he’s a man on a quest for understanding ... In this moving memoir, the Boss pulls back the curtains of the myth-making machinery and shows that for him, the political is personal ... Bruce writes like he talks. There are colorful characters, embarrassing details, and a moral as punch line at every climactic finale. He’s a smart guy, a well-read autodidact with a driving intellect, but he tends to write in capital letters rather than big words. He’s not always so good at deconstructing the big picture, but his aim is true.
Patti Smith
Mixed Los Angeles Review of Books Certainly, M Train is self-indulgent. It’s the experimental work you get to do after you’ve made bank. Patti paid her dues for decades, finally got paid, and can write whatever she wants as far as I’m concerned. Sure, I got a little tired of all the paeans to dead dudes. But I ached to be in the Alamo; her dream of life there flew off the page.
Chrissie Hynde
Mixed The Los Angeles Times Hynde offers a story of coming of age in the heartland's baby-boom bust, with sometimes brutal passages told in her inimitable blunt, jocular and occasionally woefully tone-deaf vernacular.