A must-read for anyone who has wondered why the Stone Roses ever mattered.
As definitive an account of the surprising rise and spectacular fall of seminal 1980s Brit rockers the Stone Roses as a fan could hope for.
Music journalist Spence (Just Can't Get Enough: The Making of Depeche Mode, 2011, etc.) interviewed almost every important person in the history of the band, including all of its members, managers, producers and most of its roadie coterie save one (road manager Steve Adge, who’s writing his own Roses history). This sounds easier than it was, given several members’ penchant for mystery and silence since the band’s bitter breakup in 1996. Fortuitously for Spence, by the time he had connected with the members of its best-known incarnation—singer Ian Brown, guitarist John Squire, drummer Alan “Reni” Wren and bassist Gary "Mani" Mounfield—15 years’ worth of ice, particularly between founders, chief song scribes and boyhood friends Brown and Squire, was beginning to thaw. Even at their heyday, the Roses could be prickly and unpredictable regarding outside expectations. Following the release of their brilliant, eponymous 1989 debut LP, which The Observer has since called the best rock album ever, the band’s creativity seemed to dry up as they battled their record company and self-aggrandizing manager Gareth Evans over two of the worst contracts in rock ’n’ roll history. When they finally produced "The Second Coming" for Geffen three years later, internal fissures, which Evans seemed to create when he gave Brown and Squire sole credit (and the attendant financial rewards) for the band’s collective compositions, began to crack wide open. A long-promised tour of the United States, repeatedly canceled, came together only after a key member had quit and just months before the band self-imploded. This book is being released in time for a reunion tour of the U.S. in the summer of 2013.
A must-read for anyone who has wondered why the Stone Roses ever mattered.Pub Date: April 2, 2013
ISBN: 978-1250030825
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Review Posted Online: Dec. 24, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 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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