A bit too light and breezy for casual rock fans, but the group’s adherents will find it a nice, tidy history.
Debut author Bledsoe, an original member of the 1960s rock ’n’ roll group The Swingin’ Medallions, gives his account of the band’s history in this straightforward memoir.
The Swingin’ Medallions lived an American dream, going from packing clubs in Alabama and South Carolina to hitting the Billboard charts with the top-20 hit “Double Shot (of My Baby’s Love)” in 1966. Their success allowed them to tour the country and appear on shows hosted by Dick Clark (Where the Action Is) and Casey Kasem, pre-American Top 40. They also made famous friends, such as singer Rufus Thomas, humorist Lewis Grizzard, and musician Curtis Mayfield. Bledsoe spends most of his time on the band’s early history, but he does include a bit about The Swingin’ Medallions’ current incarnation in a later chapter. Fans will surely enjoy having all the dates and details of the group’s past in one handy volume, and Bledsoe includes plenty of newspaper clippings to peruse. James Brown fans will enjoy a bit involving the Godfather of Soul and Smash Records, the Medallions’ label. However, the voices of other members of the group and other witnesses to its history are missing, so the book’s job feels half done. The skeleton of the story is here, but there are no quotes from other players, and the anecdotes never get too deep. For example, the author notes that the band supported him after his wife took her own life, but he doesn’t mention who specifically helped him get through such a terrible time, or how. He also brings up the fascinating detail that he, as a teacher, and the other band members, as students, couldn’t work on the band full time for fear of being drafted. However, he doesn’t talk about the effects that this situation had on their work, or how he or the others felt about it. Instead, readers get details about the band’s favorite rides at Disneyland.
A bit too light and breezy for casual rock fans, but the group’s adherents will find it a nice, tidy history.Pub Date: June 27, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-984537-01-0
Page Count: 116
Publisher: XlibrisUS
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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