BRESKIN, David

PERSONAL: Male.

ADDRESSES: Home—1061 Francisco St., San Francisco, CA 94109-1126.

CAREER: Music producer and freelance writer.

WRITINGS:

(With Cheryl McCall and Roger Hilburn) We Are the World, Perigee Books (New York, NY), 1985.

The Real Life Diary of a Boomtown Girl (novel), Viking (New York, NY), 1989.

Inner Views: Filmmakers in Conversation, Faber & Faber (Boston, MA), 1992, expanded edition, Da Capo Press (Cambridge, MA), 1997.

Fresh Kills (poetry), Cleveland State University Poetry Center (Cleveland, OH), 1997.

Contributor to periodicals, including Rolling Stone, Esquire, Gentleman's Quarterly, New Yorker, TriQuarterly, Paris Review, Boulevard, Nimrod, and Salmagundi.

SIDELIGHTS: Music producer and freelance writer David Breskin draws on his background in entertainment in his writings. His first book, We Are the World, a collaborative effort with Cheryl McCall and Roger Hilburn, is about the singers and musicians who put together and performed the title song for the charitable cause of feeding the world's hungry. Written by Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie and produced by Quincy Jones, the song was also made a reality with the help of Breskin, who was involved in its production. We Are the World includes photographs and sheet music from the song and contains "all the nitty gritty" of how it was produced, according to a People contributor.

Breskin draws on his work for Rolling Stone in his collection of interviews published as Inner Views: Filmmakers in Conversation. Some of the conversations here include Francis Ford Coppola talking about The Godfather Part III, Oliver Stone on JFK, and Spike Lee analyzing Do the Right Thing, among many more movie director and producer heavyweights. Reviewing Inner Views for Voice Literary Supplement, Katherine Dieckmann noted an absence of female filmmakers, yet found Breskin's interviews to be "elegant, thorough, and dogged." Sybil Steinberg, writing in Publishers Weekly, felt some of Breskin's remarks to be "good," though "some of his critical judgments are questionable."

In addition to his nonfiction, Breskin has written a novel and a book of poetry. His novel, The Real Life Diary of a Boomtown Girl, which is set in Gillette, Wyoming, during the 1980s, "evokes" the "saloons, cocaine snorting, hot tubs, waterbeds, [and] rock 'n' roll dances" of the American West of the time, according to Steinberg in another Publishers Weekly review. The central character is nineteen-year-old Randi Bruce, who works in the oil fields and strip mines where the ratio of men to women is six to one. Prospering in the high-paying employment market, Randi keeps a diary that records her lusty lifestyle and progression of jobs that leads to a spot on the "first all-women blasting team in the country." The team is dubbed the "BoomBoom Girls." While working one of her coal-moving jobs, Randi meets Derek Harper, a nice guy from North Dakota; they marry, but problems soon develop. Randi is also troubled by her parents' divorce and the fact that her sister is seeing a drug dealer. On top of it all, Randi becomes injured homebound, causing further strains on her marriage. A Kirkus Reviews critic complained that Randi is an "inarticulate narrator" who tries "the reader's patience." On the other hand, Booklist contributor Margaret Flanagan called the novel a "candid cultural chronicle of the modern American west."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, September 15, 1989, Margaret Flanagan, review of The Real Life Diary of a Boomtown Girl, p. 143.

Kirkus Reviews, August 1, 1989, review of The Real Life Diary of a Boomtown Girl, p. 1088.

People, May 6, 1985, review of We Are the World, p. 20.

Publishers Weekly, August 11, 1989, review of The Real Life Diary of a Boomtown Girl, p. 442; October 5, 1992, Sybil Steinberg, review of Inner Views: Filmmakers in Conversation, p. 65.

Voice Literary Supplement, February, 1993, Katherine Dieckmann, "Fame," p. 31.*