Hendrix’s story is finally lost in a purple haze.
Kurt Cobain’s biographer takes on the great rock guitarist’s legacy and misses the mark.
Cross, former editor of the Seattle alternative weekly The Rocket, reached bestseller lists with his biography of Nirvana’s ill-fated front man (Heavier Than Heaven, 2001). In this book he reconsiders another Washington state icon, ‘60s rock superstar Jimi Hendrix. Due on the eve of the 35th anniversary of Hendrix’s death at 27 from an accidental overdose, Cross’ biography sits somewhat in the shadow of Keith Shadwick’s comprehensive Jimi Hendrix Musician (2003), as well as such precursors as Harry Shapiro and Caesar Glebbeek’s Jimi Hendrix: Electric Gypsy (1990) and Charles Shaar Murray’s Crosstown Traffic (1989). Cross is strongest in his chapters about Hendrix’s deprived upbringing in Seattle and the first stirrings of his musical urges, but his tales of Hendrix’s apprenticeship on the Southern chitlin’ circuit and his artistic development in the hipster cauldron of Greenwich Village in the mid-‘60s feel underreported. Worse, Hendrix’s 1966 arrival in London, where he quickly became the toast of English musical society, reads like a twice-told tale. We hear again that Hendrix slept with his guitar, but little attention is paid to exactly how he developed his stunning musical and technical gifts. His prodigious mastery of the studio, still a large part of the guitarist’s testament, receives virtually no scrutiny — his sessions are viewed as just part of the blur that accompanied his snowballing fame. While Hendrix’s ascent as a black musician playing for white rock ‘n’ roll audiences (and viewed in some quarters as a racial sell-out) is contemplated, Cross seems either unwilling or unable to grapple with this contradiction, which was so central to Hendrix’s inexorable rise. One ultimately understands that Hendrix was crushed by the burden of celebrity, but the sources of that celebrity remain vague.
Hendrix’s story is finally lost in a purple haze.Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2005
ISBN: 1-4013-0028-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2005
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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
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
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