Review

[ateolf]

We went and did our Fresh Market run during my lunch break. When we got back home, there was this huge black fuzzy caterpillar crawling along next to the car. I don't think I've ever seen anything like it out in the wild. I looked it up and it turns out to be the larva of a Giant Leopard Moth. In the afternoon, I finished reading To Hell with Poverty! by Jon King. As I mentioned when I received it, I won it from the librarything early reviewers program so I had to write a review of it anyway. Might as well put that down here.

This is an enjoyable memoir about Jon King's life up through Gang of Four's first run. It's packed full of anecdotes that are sure to please any Gang of Four fan. It does feel like it spends a bit much time on his earlier childhood. Now a lot of that feels necessary and I'm glad to have read it, but there's maybe a small chunk of the first half that keeps it from moving along. His style is very humorous and there are plenty of laugh-out-loud moments. It picks up when he talks about the band and there are plenty of amusing stories. (I've had to resist a few gags, so I'll just get it out of the way now...something about its "entertainment" value and reading about "what we all want" to read, okay, got that out of my system in these parentheses). The chapters about the band feel more like a string of anecdotes than a narrative, which makes sense from the perspective of memory, but the earlier chapters had more of a narrative feel so the two halves have a somewhat different feel. It also seems like he's leaving a lot holes and avoiding a lot of subjects (for example, it's slightly jarring when he talks about his wedding after only the briefest mention of having been in a relationship since "high school" much earlier in the book), but I imagine that may have something to do with not wanting to drag too many living people through his memoir. He also makes allusions to his own flaws in pretty vague terms (though going into much detail about Andy Gill's, albeit from a place of love and the subject could not very well be avoided given the direction of the band), but does not go really get into talking about what they actually are. (I get it, I mean, who wants to slag off on themselves? I only mention it as he himself implies that there's more to it and then leaves the subject hanging.) As I said before, he doesn't say anything about the rest of his life after the band dissolved for the first time, He doesn't even bring up any of the band's reunions (maybe they're just not at all interesting to talk and read about, but I did find it a little odd that the remaining thirty years didn't come up even in a passing sentence, not that that's the information I'm clamoring for when reading a Gang of Four book!). I've been a big fan of Gang of Four's music for decades but never really knew anything about their story, so I went into this cold and learned a lot. It's a funny, fast-paced, and engaging read. It does feel like it's putting up one side of the story, but it is Jon King's memoir so that's the whole point, right?

Then in the evening, Mary Beth and I went for a walk around the neighborhood. We ended the night with a little Henry's Kitchen. That's about it.