Hardcore Mac fans will likely drool over Harris’s insider tidbits. Everyone else will believe that this could have been...
Everything you always wanted to know about Lindsey Buckingham, but wait a sec…how much do you really want to know about Lindsey Buckingham?
Casual followers of Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Famers Fleetwood Mac recognize them as a unit that evolved from blue-eyed blues purveyors to one of the most superb bands of their era. Hardcore Mac fans, on the other hand, know the quintet as a partner-swapping, drink-and-drug-fueled soap opera, albeit an astoundingly talented one. Guitarist/vocalist/composer Buckingham was arguably the most talented member of the group, as well as its most unstable. At once arrogant and insecure, he was lost in a haze of substance abuse and ego in 1977 when the band’s magnum opus, Rumours, made them international megastars. And a little blonde cherub named Carol Ann Harris came along for the whole ride as the enigmatic Buckingham’s lover. In her overly detailed confessional memoir, Harris delivers the story of the band’s tumultuous climb in a breathless, catty fashion. She seems to believe that every move her boyfriend made is of the utmost importance: Lindsey acted like a jerk when he met Kenny Rogers! Lindsey was mean to everybody during a recording session! Lindsey and I went to Hawaii and ate some coconut cream pie! This approach diminishes the impact of actually important events in the couple’s lives, i.e. the time Buckingham had a seizure, or his attempt to strangle the author. While he certainly played a key role in creating one of the most enduring albums of the 1970s, does Buckingham’s story merit a 400-page tome written by his unknown gal pal?
Hardcore Mac fans will likely drool over Harris’s insider tidbits. Everyone else will believe that this could have been pared down to a two-part article in Rolling Stone.Pub Date: July 15, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-55652-660-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2007
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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