Between a Heart and a Rock Place by Pat Benatar

Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, the Donnas, Fergie... the list goes on and on.  But their careers likely would have been considerably rockier and likely even a bit less successful had women like Pat Benatar not paved the way for them.


Most of us know her hits Heartbreaker, Hit Me With Your Best Shot, Love is a Battlefield, Invincible, and We Belong to name but a few.  But there's so much more to her story than her hits and the path not only to her success but once she attained it was far more difficult than most realize.


Even if you're not a big fan of Ms. Benatar's music, and admittedly prior to being approached for this review my familiarity with her work was largely limited to her hits, Between a Heart and a Rock Place is a thoroughly enjoyable read.


Pat gives a very candid snapshot of the music industry of the late seventies and throughout the eighties-- its superficiality, its obsession with image, and the many double standards applied to female musicians that weren't necessarily applied to male musicians-- at least not to the same extent.


The stories that are told of record label executives and the peek behind the curtain to see the Wizard that Ms. Benatar provides throughout her book shows the considerably less glamorous and far less savory side of the music industry;  How they tried to tell her how to look, how to dress, discouraged her relationship with her guitarist and later husband Neil "Spyder" Giraldo, and even attempted to hide her pregnancy for her first daughter and make her feel ashamed of it; all of it would make for quite an incredible novel but what makes it even more chilling-- it's all true!


Without giving too much away-- this book is a must read for any fan of music, anyone curious about how the recording industry works, and certainly for any aspiring musicians whether or not you happen to be fans of Pat Benatar as a musician.  The insights provided give a glimpse of how much popular music has evolved from the late seventies to the present and it's all through the eyes of one of the most successful female rockers in the history of rock and roll!


Related Links & Media
Promo video for the book's release:

Pat Benatar(official site)
Pat Benatar (wikipedia)

Come On Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All by Christina Thompson

Come On Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All is both a history and a memoir wrapped in a unique little package. It's a story of both Christina Thompson's marriage to a Maori man and the history of the relationship between the Paheka (Europeans), Maoris, and other Polynesians. It's also an observation of how the perceptions the Paheka have of the Maori and vice versa have shaped those cultures since the first meeting of Maoris and Paheka.

The book succeeds quite well as a history. Thompson's approach to the history of the relationship of the two cultures is both informative and engaging. Where the book gets a little more shaky is as a memoir. At times I could relate to Thompson's description of the pull she felt towards the South Pacific as I too have felt a similar pull. But at other times when writing about her life, Thompson came across as so detached from what was going on that she seemed to be more an observer than a participant in her own life.

From an anthropological standpoint, this actually works quite well and certainly to Thompson's benefit. Yet at the same time it left me wondering whether she was actually living her life or was merely along for the ride, content to watch. While I felt a connection to Thompson early on, as the book progressed her writing style seemed to grow increasingly more detached. I almost felt as if I was watching the shift first hand, from participant to observer of one's own life.

There are certainly benefits to objectivity and for a history book, objectivity is certainly something to strive for. But in a memoir, generally readers prefer to feel some connection to or empathy for the author and when an author is too objective that connection becomes increasingly more difficult to make.

With all that said, this is still a book I would recommend as Thompson raises excellent and intriguing points and questions. In a letter to her three sons which she included in the book she even goes so far as to say:

“in each of you is a little bit of the conqueror and the conquered, the colonizer and the colonized.”

How does one reconcile being the child of both a culture that was ravaged by European conquest and the child of the European culture that ravaged them? And how do mixed culture parents raise children in such an environment?

In the end, as much as I enjoyed this book, I feel I would have enjoyed it considerably more had it been a bit more personal and a bit less detached. The connection I felt with Thompson early in the book faded as the book progressed. The history was intriguing, the questions raised were thought provoking, but in a memoir there should be a bit more of an emotional investment on the part of the reader. But it's the obligation of the author to create that connection. And while Thompson certainly created that connection, I found it to be much weaker than with other memoirs that I've read.

Related Links
Come On Shore (official website)
Come On Shore And We Will Kill and Eat You All (Amazon.com)

And You Know You Should Be Glad by Bob Greene

For years Bob Greene was a regular columnist for the Chicago Tribune his columns evoked a common Midwestern everyman feel to them. He wrote about the things people cared about and he wrote those things from the heart.

And You Know You Should Be Glad is a natural extension of his columns-- the biography of a friendship, Greene's lifelong friendship with Jack Roth. But in Greene's friendship with Jack we're given a journey of exploration into our own friendships. We as readers can understand the emotional journey of the friendship as most of us have had or still have that friend. The one with whom you don't need to tell how you feel because he already knows. That friend who instinctively knows when to call you without being asked and that friend whom you would drop everything for if you were ever called upon to do so.

Greene was asked to do just that when called by another in his fabulous fivesome of Allen, Chuck, Dan, and Jack (and of course Bob Greene himself):

"Give me a call," the voice continued. "It's about Jack. He's a little ill, and I wanted to explain it to you." Chuck had never couched a sentence in words like that in our lives.

With a simple phone call the emotional journey begins. As someone who believes life is about the journey rather than the destination. This book exemplifies that very spirit. The book is a journey. In the end, we all know the destination. But Greene does an excellent job of making this book not so much about that destination but about the journey of friendship he took with Allen, Chuck, Dan, and Jack.

We feel those bonds of friendship with his friends because many of us have felt those very same bonds with friends of our own. We come to know and enjoy the inside jokes and the "you had to be there" style of stories of the adventures he and his friends went on together in this long journey called life.

In the end this book isn't just the biography of a friendship, it's a tribute to good friendships everywhere. It works so well because, much like with Greene's old Tribune columns, it strikes a chord with all of us.