Despite its psychologically thin veneer, the book is a harrowing cautionary tale of the perilous freedoms that rock stardom...
Go-Go’s singer and popular solo songstress reflects on her struggles with identity, drugs and the pitfalls of pop stardom.
The author was raised by her mother in the Southern California suburbs, where she became the beneficiary of right-place-at-the-right-time serendipity while experimenting with the burgeoning late-’70s L.A. punk scene. She almost inadvertently became the cherubic lead singer for all-girl pop-punk group the Go-Go’s. Their rise to superstardom in the ’80s seemed as unexpected as it was inevitable. One minute Carlisle and her girlfriends were sitting on a curb in Hollywood talking about playing music, and the next they were the first all-female band to hit No. 1 on the Billboard charts with songs they wrote and played themselves. The author’s recollections of the years through her late-’80s period of solo success are awhirl with drug binges, drunken escapades, celebrity boyfriends, band infighting and nonstop touring. Despite the transience of her pop-star lifestyle, two constants in her life prevailed: cocaine and insecurity. The book’s familiar double-edged–sword success story takes shape early on. Once large amounts of money were at stake, suddenly egos damaged more easily and personality conflicts flared up among the Go-Go’s, leading to the group’s initial breakup in 1985. Even with her mega-successful solo career, which included hits like “Mad About You,” Carlisle was still short on self-knowledge and spiritual fulfillment. She eventually found herself in a semi-functional marriage to Morgan Mason, the wealthy scion of actor James Mason. Although readers may find it difficult to sympathize with the author’s combination of discontent and moneyed privilege, her memoir is generously confessional enough to give a compelling edge to her battle with substance abuse and her quest for spiritual balance.
Despite its psychologically thin veneer, the book is a harrowing cautionary tale of the perilous freedoms that rock stardom brings.Pub Date: June 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-307-46349-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2010
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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