In these pages Springsteen remains, for all his apparent openness, both personally and artistically remote, and Dolan’s...
The Boss’ canon receives trainspotting treatment via his concert appearances and recordings.
Dolan eschews original research in this uncomfortable hybrid of biography and criticism. The rocker’s life has been scrutinized in previous bios by Dave Marsh, Marc Eliot and Robert Santelli, and their work provides the structural backbone of this book. The contours of the tale will be familiar to Springsteen enthusiasts: Jersey Shore bar-band roots, early-’70s cult arrival, popular breakthrough with 1975’s Born to Run, launch to superstardom with 1984’s Born in the U.S.A., etc. Dolan analyzes the musician’s progress primarily via close, grueling readings of Springsteen’s set lists over the course of 40-plus years on stage, amply documented on bootlegs, with additional attention to the oft-protracted genesis of his albums in studio sessions and home recordings. It makes for arduous reading, and Dolan’s conclusions are often suspect. While Springsteen is undoubtedly among the hardest-working live performers in rock history, and his gigs ably combine arena-rock showmanship and a carefully cultivated intimacy and sincerity, his shows and the lengthy raps that stud them only reveal so much about his internal impulses. The author goes to laborious lengths to calibrate minute differences in Springsteen’s shows over the course of individual tours. He also makes a great deal of the slow development of Springsteen’s political and social consciousness, but most of his divinations are based on contorted explications of his concerts and their attendant spiels. Dolan exhibits a frustrating inability to plumb Springsteen’s interior emotional makeup; as in previous tomes, his short-lived marriage to Julianne Phillips and his unexpected metamorphosis into midlife family man with Patti Scialfa remain mystifying.
In these pages Springsteen remains, for all his apparent openness, both personally and artistically remote, and Dolan’s interpretive methodology sheds limited light.Pub Date: June 4, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-393-08135-0
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2012
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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