Wareham may not demonstrate the sharpest narrative focus, but his memoir is refreshingly confident and unsentimental in its...
Indie-rock icon recalls life in the studio and on the road.
Wareham begins with a chronicle of his childhood and early adult life. Born in New Zealand, his family moved to New York City in 1977. While attending the exclusive Dalton School, he frequented CBGB’s, Irving Plaza, the Palladium and other venues, catching performances by the Clash, the Talking Heads, the Ramones, Pere Ubu, Television and many others. In 1981, Wareham enrolled at Harvard and soon after started his first band, Speedy and the Castanets: “[We] sucked. We were clueless and talentless. And yet we felt we were the only interesting band on campus. So what if we couldn’t play? If nothing else, we had our arrogance.” Such sentiment colors most of the narrative, as the author offers frequent asides about music, philosophy and the art of performance—some enlightening, others trite, but all unflinchingly honest. On a particularly poor Bob Dylan show: “He had that dolt GE Smith on guitar. GE Smith was the bandleader on Saturday Night Live, and he was best known for making too many rock faces. Maybe his playing would be tolerable if he put a paper bag over his head.” While living in Boston in the early ’80s, guitarist and singer Wareham founded Galaxie 500 with two friends. The band toiled in the small-club scene for a few years and then gradually built a loyal fan base touring across the United States and playing a few international rock festivals, including the Glastonbury Festival in England and Roskilde in Denmark. Though Galaxie 500 eventually developed a cult following, Wareham quit in 1991 and went on to found Luna, the band for which he would become best known. After releasing Lunapark, the band embarked on their first tour, landing an opening slot for the Screaming Trees. A second album, Bewitched, followed, but it was their third album, Penthouse, on which “Luna really hit its stride musically…we had learned to appreciate the subtleties of one another’s playing.” The author provides a highly detailed, if occasionally scattershot, account of his life—including the addition of bassist Britta Phillips (“the best visible panty line in rock”), with whom the author had an affair, then eventually married—and he tosses in enough pointed musical and cultural commentary to satisfy even the most jaded rock-bio fan.
Wareham may not demonstrate the sharpest narrative focus, but his memoir is refreshingly confident and unsentimental in its exploration of life in the indie-rock trenches.Pub Date: March 17, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59420-155-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2007
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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