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
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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