Heavy on style, light on revelation.
Walker (Laurel Canyon, 2006) argues convincingly that rock experienced significant change in the early 1970s among artists, audience and industry alike.
It's regrettable, then, that some quality writing and incisive analysis is undermined by the author’s peculiar focus on three bands and one year. Readers may well wonder why a book that takes its title from a 1975 David Bowie hit (“Fame”) is instead about Led Zeppelin, the Who and Alice Cooper in 1973. That year, all three launched massive tours the author sees as fraught with epochal impact, the likes of which “the world has not seen since and probably never will again.” Walker has a weakness for such grandiose pronouncements (he also bids us, “Welcome to 1973—the year the sixties die”); fortunately, he's usually a smart observer and reporter. Because so much has already been written about the other two groups, Alice Cooper initially seems to be the odd band out, but it's the one to which the author apparently had the most access and certainly does the best job of putting in fresh perspective, as originators of a style of theatrical showmanship that would leave an imprint on rock tours to come. In the early ’70s, peace and love gave way to harder drugs and more outrageous debauchery; the audience got younger, the bands richer and the business more cutthroat. Rock became a different animal, and Walker does an often provocative, never-less-than-serviceable job of showing how and why. He vividly captures the frustrations of the Who, the excesses of Led Zeppelin and the jealousies within Alice Cooper. It should also be noted, however, that he draws heavily on what has long been known and already written, and his odd decision to slip into the present tense for extended stretches does not improve the narrative's coherence.
Heavy on style, light on revelation.Pub Date: July 23, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9288-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2013
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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