Wilkinson strikes exactly the right notes in this deft look at one of America’s towering musical treasures.
An economical, unsentimental, illuminating look at the venerable folk singer.
Veteran New Yorker contributor Wilkinson (The Happiest Man in the World: An Account of the Life of Poppa Neutrino, 2007, etc.) here expands a magazine profile of Seeger, who turns 90 this May. The musician asked the journalist to pen a book that could be read in one sitting, and we see a pleasingly close-up view as he rattles around the Beacon, N.Y., cabin he built with his own hands. The author gracefully reveals the arc of Seeger’s life and career. Born into a privileged, musical family, as a youth the musician gained a love for American folk music, facility on the five-string banjo and a commitment to political and social causes. He dropped out of Harvard to play with folk icon Woody Guthrie and work with folklorist John Lomax at the Library of Congress. After some time on the road, Seeger was embraced as a performer—first by the American left as a member of the Almanac Singers and then by pop listeners as part of the hitmaking quartet the Weavers, who notched a No. 1 hit in 1950 with “Goodnight, Irene.” The core of the book focuses on his victimization during the Joseph McCarthy witch hunts, when his ex-Communist background led to the Weavers’ blacklisting and Seeger’s appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee, which resulted in a contempt of Congress conviction that was later overturned. Effectively shut out of performing on television for a decade, Seeger nonetheless became the dean of the American folk-music movement, thanks to his fearless and principled work on behalf of the nuclear-disarmament, civil-rights, antiwar and environmental movements. Here he emerges as a quiet, matter-of-fact yet hard-headed and courageous individual with a rare gift for drawing listeners of all ages into his songs, and a political boldness as understated as it is uncompromising.
Wilkinson strikes exactly the right notes in this deft look at one of America’s towering musical treasures.Pub Date: May 3, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-307-26995-9
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2009
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
