A rock bio with snap.
A breezy, boozy account of an explosive moment in pop music.
London in the mid-1990s was an epicenter of the music and art worlds, verging on a major political shift. James, formerly the bassist in Britpop band Blur and contributor to several British magazines, recounts his ascent to rock stardom and the subsequent rapid explosion of his ego with plenty of wit in hindsight. He affectionately recalls his boyhood in Bournemouth dreaming of appearing on Top of the Pops. “In all the time I have been making music, nothing quite so fantastic as what happened in the next five minutes has ever happened again,” he writes of a teenage bedroom rehearsal with two friends. In 1988, enrolled at London’s Goldsmiths College, James met best friend and Blur band mate Graham Coxon (“brilliantly artistic, but vulnerable”), artist Damien Hirst and first-love Justine, with whom he fell in and out for several years. Blur, originally called Seymour, signed with EMI Records at the height of pop music’s obsession with grunge. When the shambling Britpop sound caught on globally, James found himself rich and famous in his early 20s. “I’d tell myself it was the duty of rock stars to indulge themselves beyond reasonable limits,” he writes. “If I couldn’t be reckless and extreme, I wasn’t doing my job properly.” James felt free to indulge his passions, which in addition to the usual drink and drugs included astronomy and fancy cheeses, extolled in refreshing, if long-winded vignettes. Readers may feel slightly overstuffed by the time the rock star sobers up and settles down in the country, but James’s self-awareness on the page saves him from innumerable tabloid clichés. He’d rather name fine hotels and bars than the glitterati frequenting them, and he never forgets how he arrived at such a rarefied perch, looking back with a teenager’s sense of awe.
A rock bio with snap.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-316-02995-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown UK/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2008
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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