Minus any illuminating self-exploration, Womack’s saga is a fitfully colorful but ultimately empty and depressing tale of a...
The life and extreme times of a well-traveled soul man.
It’s tough to top the sensational first chapter of soul singer and songwriter Womack’s autobiography, in which his wife—widow of the late Sam Cooke, whom he married less than four months after the singer’s shooting death—attempts to kill him after she discovers him sleeping with his stepdaughter. In fact, it’s all downhill from there in this perplexing book, first published in the U.K. in 2006. Womack’s life was certainly not without incident. Raised in Cleveland in a gospel-singing family, he rose to fame as Cooke’s protégé in the Valentinos, whose ’60s hits included “It’s All Over Now,” which became a breakthrough cover for the Rolling Stones. After playing guitar in Ray Charles’ band and crafting hits for Wilson Pickett, Womack stepped out on his own, creating the bestselling albums Communication, Understanding and The Poet. His career, which also encompassed encounters with Janis Joplin (on the last night of her life), the Stones and the Faces, takes a backseat to stories of drug abuse (in the company of such notorious figures as Ike Turner and Sly Stone), drinking and womanizing. Along the way, he recounts the breakup of two marriages, the murder of a brother, the deaths of two sons and the jailing of a third. It’s frustrating reading, for Womack and collaborator Robert Ashton present his hair-raising and outrageous stories matter-of-factly, with little analysis of the character flaws that laid him so low in life; adversity has evidently taught him nothing. His chronology is frequently garbled; facts and names are scrambled; and the narrative takes enormous leaps. Some stories appear embroidered or simply implausible: For instance, Womack devotes several pages to Cooke’s purported decision to not release “A Change is Gonna Come,” while the song actually appeared on an album six months before the singer’s death.
Minus any illuminating self-exploration, Womack’s saga is a fitfully colorful but ultimately empty and depressing tale of a misspent musical life.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-84454-148-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: John Blake/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2007
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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
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