Nevertheless, as cultural history and biography this is both cogent and entertaining, if occasionally over-written.
Murray (Crosstown Traffic, not reviewed) turns his attention to one of Hendrix’s musical forebears, bluesman John Lee Hooker.
It is tempting to see Hooker, as Murray does, as an archetypal figure. Indeed, his story has been duplicated in the lives of many African-Americans who made the trek northward from the Mississippi Delta to the burgeoning industrial Midwest in search of an escape from the grinding poverty of sharecropping and the oppressions of Jim Crow. Hooker was born sometime between 1917 and 1920 (although he has claimed several other dates) near Clarksdale, Mississippi. He went north to Detroit just before WWII and, after a very brief stint in the Army, scuffled through a series of short-term day jobs, all the while expecting to make a living as a musician. Miraculously, he did just that, with a series of recordings made for a small label owned by Bernie Besman. One of the very first sides Hooker cut for Besman, “Boogie Chillen,” became an instant and enormous success—it continues to sell even today—and put Hooker on his way to fame. Since that explosion, Hooker’s career has charted the same ups and downs common to other blues giants of his generation (Muddy Waters comes to mind) with a mixture of classic blues recordings and misguided attempts to capture a rock audience. Now somewhere in his 80s, Hooker continues to tour with a band, an experience that Murray limns convincingly. The author’s reach often exceeds his grasp, however, as he tries to render Hooker as a larger-than-life figure of myth—even going so far as to invoke Joseph Campbell. Hooker is a musician, a master of a narrow slice of a much larger and complex pie called the blues; Murray should have let his story speak more for itself.
Nevertheless, as cultural history and biography this is both cogent and entertaining, if occasionally over-written.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-312-26563-8
Page Count: 544
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2000
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
