Arts & Entertainment

Mind-numbing minutia

‘Untold story of Queen’ offers too many details for casual fans

Published

15 years ago

June 16, 2011

Terri Schlichenmeyer

‘Is This the Real Life? The Untold Story of Queen’
By Mark Blake
c.2011, Da Capo
$25/410 pages

Sometimes it seems as though the building might fall down.

Stomp-stomp-clap. Stomp-stomp-clap. Sports fans know how to make noise, but it’s not the cheers that raise the rafters during games, tournaments and playoffs. No, the stadium shakes at a sound that rattles the roof, supports the team and is awfully fun to do. Stomp-stomp-clap, and when your team wins, it gets better: there’s the other half of the song to sing.

You know where that tune came from. You might even remember where you first heard it. In “Is This the Real Life? The Untold Story of Queen” by Mark Blake, you’ll learn about the band that brought sports fans that anthem, and more.

If you were going to create a musical group, you’d be hard-pressed to find a more motley crew.

Farrokh Bulsara was born on an island near Zanzibar into a family that was wealthy enough to afford domestic staff. Young Farrokh — usually called Freddie — was a popular boy who loved music and adored Jimi Hendrix, was self-conscious about his teeth, and had a flair for the dramatic. His friends tolerated Freddie’s eccentricities, figuring them to be “just Fred.”

Brian May didn’t live far from Fred Bulsara once Freddie, who was gay and died of AIDS in 1991, landed in England, but May later came to realize that they’d been at the same Hendrix concert once. May, who would go on to earn a bachelor’s degree in astrophysics, loved to improvise on guitar, just like Jimi.

Roger Taylor remembers banging on his mother’s pans as a child. He joined May in a band after seeing an ad in a local drum shop. And John Deacon, a relative late-comer, had gone to school to be an electrical engineer as a fall-back career, in case his musical career didn’t pan out.

And while May, Taylor and Deacon were playing together and with other musicians, growing their experience and honing their talents, they had one very exacting, particular fan: a roadie named Fred who liked to give them advice after their gigs.

With so much attention to detail, so many little tidbits for fans, and so many memories it evokes, it’s hard to hate a book like “Is This the Real Life?”

But it’s hard to love it, too.

Author Mark Blake doesn’t seem to have missed one single event in the lives of the men who were Queen, or the few women who were peripherally involved with those men. While some of those finer points make this book trivia heaven for Queen fans, much of it plods along: lengthy accounts of concert dates, musicians who came and went throughout the decades, people that the four band members knew as children, and other minutiae that die-hard musicians and rabid followers will be mindful of, but that most of us will find mind-numbing.

If your iPod is filled with greatest hits and you couldn’t look at this book without singing the title, “Is This the Real Life?” will be a royal treat for you. If you’re not quixotic on Queen, though, just stomp away.

And if you’ve already located your Queen on vinyl and are searching for a good place to curl up and reminisce, you’ll also want to find “Queen: The Ultimate Illustrated History of the Crown Kings of Rock” by Phil Sutcliffe (Voyageur Press, 2011). Jam-packed with pictures, poster reproductions, and lots more information on the boys in the band, this huge paperback book will thrill rock ‘n roll fans and will show youngsters how rock was really done.

Books

New book reveals what we can learn from animal sex

‘Poking the Squid’ on homosexuality, gender swapping, and more

Published

2 days ago

July 13, 2026

Terri Schlichenmeyer

(Book cover image courtesy W.W. Norton)

‘Poking the Squid: What We Can Learn from Animal Sex’
By Perrin Roosevelt Ireland
c.2026, W.W. Norton
$29.99 241 pages

Birds do it.

According to Cole Porter, bees do, too, but it’s not exactly what he imagined. Wild and tame, avians, insects, and mammals all have sex – although not always as you’ve been told or for reasons you might think. Even educated fleas do it and, as in the new book, “Poking the Squid” by Perrin Roosevelt Ireland, humans can learn from them all.

If you read through scientific papers on animal reproduction, you might notice something unusual: for scientists, the word “sex” means a lot of different things.

Says Ireland, “It’s used to describe behaviors, biology, life histories, and more.”

That might be because animals are not simply binary.

Take, for instance, hyenas. It’s easy for the casual observer to mistake a male hyena for a female and vice versa because of stereotypes of anatomy. Mating, for hyenas, requires subordination for the male and a nifty trick on the part of the female’s body to get things done.

Our feathered friends are no birdbrains, either: black-browed albatrosses were once thought to be monogamous but global warming seems to have changed their nesting habits sometimes. Male flamingos have sex with one another, as a territorial thing; other birds and animals form same-sex pairs for other reasons.

The Chinese mantis eats her mate after fertilization. Female snakes, alpacas, guinea pigs, and monkeys are anatomically able to enjoy sex. Genitalia between species varies quite a bit; in fact, the vaginas of ducks “are highly complex.” Lionesses will mate up to 100 times when in heat. Female damselflies will change into a “third sex” to avoid overly aggressive mating males. Bearded dragons can change their sex, if needed, as can yellow clown goby fish. And seahorse pregnancy and birth sparked a book banning in Tennessee.

So, asks Ireland, if animals, including us, vary so much in biology and life, “… why are we using the word sex like it means something, anything, consistent?!”

Pick up “Poking the Squid,” page through it a few seconds, and you’ll see that the information here is largely told through cartoon-like drawings mixed with captions. It seems to be something on the lighter side, but don’t let that artwork fool you.

Author Perrin Roosevelt Ireland offers readers solid information that cozies up to the scholarly, with hard science, philosophy, feminism, and quotations from researchers to support it, thus furthering the narrative and hitting the points squarely. If you see the art and expect something lighthearted, comic, and small-talk-worthy, you could be disappointed.

On the other hand, if you want solid, wryly serious facts, you’re in for a treat.

There’s lots of learning to be gleaned here, and some slight nudge-wink whimsy to emphasize the absurdity of wrong-headed thinking. This can make readers feel like they’re in-the-know on the jokes, and the playfulness balances the seriousness of the information well.

So, serious, scholarly, or slightly silly, none of these are negative but you’re going to know what you want from a book like this. For the right reader, someone in the mood, “Poking the Squid” is wild.

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