You don’t have to be a Guns N’ Roses fanatic to dig this energetic, comprehensive, few-holds-barred portrait of modern...
Tons of sex, drugs and, oh yeah, a dash of rock ’n’ roll.
The frontman of multi-platinum-selling hard-rock purveyors Guns N’ Roses, William Axl Rose was everything you could want in a rock star: enigmatic, unreliable, darkly charming, substance-abusing and, when he wanted to be, a damn good performer. Rose wasn’t like Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler, who overcame his demons and had a long, productive career; G N’ R was only truly relevant roughly between 1987 and ’93. In those few years, Rose caused a few decade’s worth of trouble, making him an ideal subject for an in-depth, in-your-face biography. U.K.-based music journalist Wall was at one time one of Rose’s favorite confidants; the singer had no compunctions about summoning the writer to his apartment for a late-night (or early-morning) confessional interview. Rose and Wall had a falling out—which explains the “unauthorized” caveat—but their once-fruitful relationship ensured that the author had more than enough firsthand source material to draw on. Wall shapes it into an archetypal rock biography that captures the runaway-train spirit of the singer and his band. Rose is a veritable tornado, and Wall does a terrific job of bringing the reader into the middle of the chaos, gleefully delivering dozens of anecdotes about the band’s mind-boggling excesses. Unlike Everett True’s baggy Nirvana (2007), Wall’s forays into first-person journalism aren’t self-serving. Rather, they add color to an already colorful story.
You don’t have to be a Guns N’ Roses fanatic to dig this energetic, comprehensive, few-holds-barred portrait of modern metal’s most charismatic figure.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-312-37767-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 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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