An impressive balance of journalistic objectivity and sympathetic tribute.
Evenhanded biography of the indie-rock chanteuse.
Admirably avoiding either hagiography or hatchet job, Blender editor at large Goodman constructs her judicious nonfiction debut mainly from the input of music-industry scenesters closest to Chan Marshall during her evolution from interestingly awkward up-and-comer to the hot international commodity known as Cat Power. The author especially excels at re-creating the neo-bohemian social milieus that shaped Marshall’s life and early career—specifically her anarchic Southern Age of Aquarius childhood (raised by a mildly schizoid mother and struggling neo-hippie musician father) and her early-1990s struggles as a starving artist in not-yet-gentrified neighborhoods like Cabbagetown in Atlanta and New York City’s Lower East Side. Marshall’s rise to indie-rock scene-queen was sparked by an anti-performance ethos that seduced alt-rock power-brokers like Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore and Gerard Cosloy of Matador Records. By the mid ’90s, her childlike fragility on stage and soul-baring vocals had positioned Cat Power as the most talked-about act on the NYC scene. She combined an irresistible androgyny with intensely personal songs that managed to be as confessional as they were inscrutable. Goodman dexterously tiptoes around any absolutist judgments on whether Marshall’s now-legendary onstage meltdowns were contrived publicity stunts or simply the result of a genuinely shattered psyche; we’re logically led to believe it’s a combination of both. Although the author reveals a deep-seated respect for her subject, she doesn’t let the slippery singer-songwriter off the hook. Detailing Marshall’s near-psychotic episodes, weighing her quietly manipulative nature or describing her 2006 near-suicide attempt, Goodman expresses a polite skepticism that penetrates the haze of press hype and effectively navigates through the artist’s self-mythologizing smokescreens.
An impressive balance of journalistic objectivity and sympathetic tribute.Pub Date: April 7, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-307-39636-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Three Rivers/Crown
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2009
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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