An adequate resource for hardcore DMB fans content to have their sycophantic reverence for the band repeatedly reinforced.
Light, fan-friendly look at one of today’s most successful American touring bands.
It’s tough to tell whether journalist and first-time author Van Noy’s book on the Dave Matthews Band is more about the band’s impact on its fans or the fans’ impact on the band. Whatever the case, this portrait of the Charlottesville, Va., band’s unlikely rise to fame reads like a 200-page press release. The book relies heavily on interviews with DMB fanatics who unconditionally praise the band. Van Noy’s writing resembles the sort of depthless amateurism you’d expect from a college newspaper and not from a professional writer. The author seems incredibly protective of her subject and never allows for much behind-the-scenes access to the band members or to their music. Much of the research consists of statistics and figures that reflect the band’s consummate popular success. The author provides tons of data on how much money the band makes on tour, how many records they sell, how many seats the venues they play hold and even how many gallons of bio-diesel fuel they burn in a year. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with writing a one-sided book from a fan’s perspective, but Van Noy is positive to a fault.
An adequate resource for hardcore DMB fans content to have their sycophantic reverence for the band repeatedly reinforced.Pub Date: June 7, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4391-8273-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
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