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Paul McCartney: A Life by Peter Ames Carlin

Pages: 340 pgs. + notes, index
First Published: Nov. 3, 2009
Rating: 4/5

First sentence:

Paul McCartney is almost home.

Reason for Reading: I like the Beatles but I love Paul.

Comments: Normally, I steer away from biographies, trying to read memoirs instead unless the person in question is dead and never wrote their own auto-biography. Well, Paul is neither, but given his extremely private nature I find it doubtful he’ll ever write a memoir and if he did it would not be in-depth but more like musings of good memories. So I jumped on this book when it came out.

Again, I find when reading these types of biographies one has to be wary as the authors are often out to dig up every piece of dirt they can on the celebrity or they don’t particularly like said person and simply enjoy writing a book that trashes them. This is not what I want. I want to read a respectful, true account of the celebrity’s life and author Peter Ames Carlin delivers on all accounts.

Right from the start one can tell that the author respects his subject and throughout the book when the controversies arise he shows the reader a ‘pro-Paul’ position. But this does not mean that he paints a fake rosy picture. Paul McCartney is exposed here warts and all. He was egocentric during the Beatles days, always being the leader, creating rifts among the other members and yet not realizing it until years much later. The intensely close relationship between him and John Lennon is examined from all sides even during the years they publicly shunned each other and Yoko Ono’s influence over John. George and Ringo are given very little space in the book. The book is about Paul and his relationships with these two do not stand out much more than ‘mates’. Though we do get at inside look at Paul’s brotherly affection to George, which was not always appreciated.

Past the Beatles, the rocky years with Wings are covered in detail, Paul’s true love, once in a lifetime relationship with his beloved Linda, his semi-success in the 80s as a solo singer, his disaster of a marriage with the vengeful Heather Mills and his eventual settlement into simply being Paul McCartney, the last of the Fab Four (as nobody really counts Ringo). We also see Paul’s reactions to nthe deaths of both John and George. A very interesting, funny, informative look inside the life of a brilliant, sensitive, egocentric, perfectionist, caring, simple-life loving man who is one of the 20th century’s most recognizable and influential musicians.

A.D. New Orleans After the Deluge by Josh Neufeld

Pages: 193
First Published: Aug 2009
Genre: nonfiction, graphic novel, biographical, current events, history
Rating: 3/5

First sentence:

Monday, August 22, 2005.

Reason for Reading: Cybil Awards nominee. Received from the library.

Summary: Follows the lives of seven individuals before, during and after Hurricane Katrina. Each of these people come from different walks of life giving very different experiences as they share the same devastation of a natural disaster.

Comments: The book is quite powerful, especially the beginning and middle. The coming of the storm is handled very dramatically with wordless panels and was my favourite part of the book. The story is told chronologically and flips between the seven people (5, technically as 2 are in pairs) this is a little confusing at first but once you get into the book the reader gets into the rhythm. Not all of the characters stay behind and while all characters are followed, inevitably those who stay are the ones with the most character development. I easily read the book in an afternoon and enjoyed the powerful firsthand view of survivors. Being Canadian this is actually the first book I’ve read on the topic.

There were a few things I didn’t like. Though the book is a firsthand account and not political, per se, it obviously has a slant that is noticeable very early on with an anti-Bush graffiti on a bathroom stall on page 26 and a very stilted, unnatural (not necessarily logical, imho) conversation near the end of the book (pg. 147/148) between two of the characters listening to a talk radio viewer questioning why so many people stayed behind. The inclusion of these two bits unobtrusively add a political slant. Secondly, there is one character who uses very foul language every time she opens her mouth, including the f-word. Her story is probably one of the most compelling but it was hard to get past the obscenities. These, though, are minor irritants to this reader and may not bother others at all. The book is certainly worth a read.

As to the book’s nomination for a Cybil, I’m going to have to say it does not, imho, qualify as having “kid appeal”. The book is written for an adult audience. There is one character who is a high school student, but he is the least significant character in the book and has little page time compared to the others. The story of his parents is more interesting than his own actually. I don’t think the stories of this group of adults are going to appeal to young teens and there is the problem with the foul language. The book would appeal to 17/18yos, but in my mind once you reach 17yo you are usually reading adult books anyway, making that a moot point.

Poe: A Life Cut Short by Peter Ackroyd
Brief Lives series

Pages: 160
First Published: Jan, 2009 (UK, 2008/Can, Mar.2009)
Genre: biography, non-fiction
Rating: 3.5/5

First sentence:

On the evening of 26 September 1849, Edgar Allan Poe stopped in the office of a physician in Richmond, Virginia — John Carter — and obtained a palliative for the fever that had beset him.

Comments: This is a short, or rather, brief biography of Edgar Allan Poe, part of a series the author has done called Brief Lives in which also includes biographies of Chaucer, Newton and Turner. This is not the first biography of Poe I have read, nor will it be the last. It has been quite some years since I last read of Poe, though, so the information was all coming fresh to my hazy mind.

For such a short book, there is a wealth of information and detail included that leaves nothing out of Poe’s tragically brief life. His melancholy and morbid life is so fascinating as one compares it to the macabre literature and poetry that he wrote. Poe was an orphan early in life, taken in by people of no relation, who, after the mother’s death, refused to have anything to do with him. He became notorious and well-known during his life but never enjoyed appreciation for his work while he was alive and thus fortune alluded him, leaving him always on the verge of penury. He also had a habit of attaching himself to women who died at young ages of consumption from his birth mother through several ladies down to his own wife. Of course, his frequent bouts of extreme drinking lasting for days which left him to be found laying in ditches by acquaintances did not help his health or his reputation.

The book is well written, including many direct quotes from contemporary sources, taken from people who knew him and newspapers of the time and his own words. The author has done a good job of giving a background as to whether the modern reader should take those quotes as truth or with a grain of salt. While focusing on his life a good deal of time is also spent on the writing of certain of his works and the literary criticism of the time; in fact a whole chapter is devoted to The Raven. I enjoyed the book and found it very interesting, even to one who had read the story before; I found this a rather studious approach to the subject. This does make the reader take the work serious but on the other hand, I did find the writing a bit dry at times. I prefer my biographies to be written in a narrative which almost reads like fiction and the quotes and literary criticism got in the way of that for me. But nevertheless a well-written book and certainly a good place to start for the person who has never read anything on Poe himself before; with only 160 pages it will give you the answer as to whether you want to read more about the man himself.

She Always Knew How: Mae West, A Personal Biography by Charlotte Chandler

Pages: 303
Finished: Mar. 11, 2009
First Published: Feb. 10, 2009
Genre: biography
Rating: 4/5

Reason for Reading: Received a review copy from Simon & Schuster Canada.

First sentence:

My first thought was, women need a Bill of Rights. “And then I thought, no, what women need is — a Bill of Wrongs.”

Comments: A very interesting biography of Mae West written by an author who interviewed West extensively near the end of her life. Mae West was a feminist before the word was invented, and a very racy character, who created herself an image based on sex that she always upheld in public. The book covers Mae’s entire life from her parents up to and including her death in 1980. Mae lived through most of the 20th century and is a legend today for her risque work both on the stage and as a playwright and her movies that pushed the boundaries of 1930s/40s morals. Mae had a way of saying the tamest thing in such a sexy way it became a double entendre.

While a biography, the book is almost completely written in Mae’s own words quoted extensively from interviews with the author and also from a few of her contemporaries such as George Cukor. The author interjects with her own narrative briefly here and there to make a cohesive narrative. I found the book extremely interesting. I love this time period of Hollywood. Though I must say Ms. West does come across as egocentric and narcissistic which surprised me not really knowing anything about the woman herself. One thing I very much enjoyed was every time a play or movie was mentioned the author included a brief synopsis of the plot and since many of these, especially the plays, were unknown to me it was very interesting indeed. I wonder if a book of Mae West’s plays has ever been published… I’d certainly like to read them.

The author has written plenty of other biographies on actors/directors of the golden age of Hollywood and I will look out for them in the future. While I always prefer to read auto-biographies, what I look for biographies is an author who respects the subject and doesn’t dish dirt nor come up with all sorts of wild (unprovable) theories. Charlotte Chandler has most certainly lived up to my expectations of a good biographer.