Written from the amen corner, nothing here will perturb the rapper’s worshippers.
Fevered hagiography of the prominent rapper and recent movie star.
Former Rolling Stone editor Bozza’s encounters with Marshall Mathers (Eminem) while writing a 1999 RS cover story form the backbone of this extended profile. At that time, Bozza recalls, Eminem was on the verge of stardom, yet still scuffling and more inclined to let his guard down: “He told me as much as he’d told any journalist . . . to the healthy dismay of his eavesdropping manager.” During their travels together, he observed an Ecstasy-fueled Eminem win over both white and black audiences in different clubs; beyond these sorts of recollections, the text essentially collects sketches and observations documenting Eminem’s rise from late-’90s regional “battle rapper” to parent-scaring boogeyman “Slim Shady,” transformed in 2002 into mainstream media darling by the film 8 Mile. Bozza grasps how Eminem’s mass appeal transcends race and age. The hip-hop community perceives him as having “paid his dues”; the ugly elements of his work resonate with an under-25 generation familiar with promiscuity, substance abuse, and domestic entanglements; and baby boomers embrace him, the author suggests, in order to be associated with youthful hipness. Although Bozza intends this as “an analysis, as much of America as . . . Eminem,” his unabashed sycophancy renders it mainly supportive of his opinion that “Eminem is hip-hop’s signpost artist, the one gifted enough to blend black and white musical and cultural elements without compromising the integrity of the music.” He supports this stance with the accolades of critics like Shelby Steele, only briefly considering and never really refuting the views of those who consider his hero a bully or corporate shill. Eventually, Bozza produces shrewd chapters on the music industry and the evolution of hip-hop in decayed, tense locales like Detroit, but only zeitgeist-chasers and youngsters who love Eminem are likely to make it that far.
Written from the amen corner, nothing here will perturb the rapper’s worshippers.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2003
ISBN: 1-4000-5059-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2003
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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