Better than a clip job, but still hit and run.
A celebration of the Velvet Underground’s enduring influence and a serviceable retelling of its story, though with little in the way of original reporting, illumination or attribution of source material for quotes.
Having previously churned out musical biographies on artists ranging from cult favorites (Perfect Sound Forever: The Story of Pavement, 2004) to those with more mainstream celebrity (George Michael, 2009), Jovanovic focuses here on the band that “managed to produce what is now described as the most influential record of rock history, The Velvet Underground & Nico (1967).” This is the sort of provocative assessment that pulls its punches, leaving readers to guess whose verdict this is (the author’s?) or how much of a consensus it represents. Similarly: “There can be a strong argument put forward for Lou Reed being the single most important person in American rock over the last four decades.” Again, the author doesn’t say whether he is in fact making that argument. To the contrary, Jovanovic often minimizes Reed’s importance, attributing the band’s splintering to his autocratic power grab—along with divide-and-conquer management, lack of record-company support and failure to achieve any commercial success. Of the original members, only drummer Moe Tucker talked with the author, though he does a good job of showing what each of the four members contributed to the early dynamic and how the creative tension between Reed and multi-instrumentalist John Cale in particular contributed something crucial, a quality lost after Reed forced Cale from the band. For those who want to know why some consider the band’s subsequent two studio albums as essential as—if not better than—the first two, or explore in more depth the artistry of Reed, Cale and the Velvets, the bibliography lists dozens of books from which the author drew, some more substantial than this.
Better than a clip job, but still hit and run.Pub Date: April 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-250-00014-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 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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