Uneven, intermittently compelling series of portraits of New Orleans musicians.
As the veteran music critic for the Times-Picayune (and a writer for a New Orleans music monthly before that), Spera would seem to be in a great position to provide a comprehensive narrative concerning the effects of the devastating hurricane on a city with such a musical lifeblood. Yet these 13 profiles, many of which have been expanded from newspaper pieces, might better serve as source material for a more ambitious book. The author plainly has access to subjects who trust him and an appreciation for younger styles of music (metal, hip-hop) that figure more strongly in contemporary New Orleans music than in most books about the city’s musical legacy. But some of the profiles are only tangentially related to Katrina and its aftermath, while too many others fall into a formulaic rhythm: opening anecdote, extended biographical chronology, effects on the subject of the devastation and destruction of Katrina. The chapters on Aaron Neville, Fats Domino, Jazz Fest director Quint Davis and formerly incarcerated rapper Mystikal are particularly pointed and revelatory. The chapter on the late cult icon Alex Chilton, however, is a missed opportunity, in which the author writes about how rare such an interview was and how articulate and intelligent the subject was, but then offers few quotes from that interview. The chapter on a recording session with Jeremy Davenport, a jazz lounge singer and trumpeter who may be well known in New Orleans but little known beyond it, does a fine job capturing the studio interplay but seems out of place given the book’s supposed focus on Katrina. “Katrina changed everyone, at least temporarily,” writes Spera, but his reporting barely scratches the surface of those profound changes. Six years after Katrina, too many of these pieces have a warmed-over feel.
Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-312-55225-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2011
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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