Definitive life of America's greatest black folk singer, by Wolfe (Mahalia Jackson, 1990) and Lornell (a consultant for the Smithsonian's Leadbelly archives). Most of Leadbelly's fans first heard his music in recordings that seemed to shore up sensational accounts of his life—accounts alleging that he had twice sung his way out of southern prisons, the power of his voice and his lyrics summoning pardons from two governors: but that's only a myth, say the authors. Early stories also depicted Leadbelly as a knife-and-gun-wielding roustabout, hard on women and quick with his fists, who nevertheless had earned the soubriquet ``The Sweet Singer of the Swamplands'': somewhat closer to the truth, Wolfe and Lornell say. Huddie Ledbetter (1889- 1949), born near Shreveport, was early on given 20 years for murder, though the authors dispute Leadbelly's guilt both in this case and in two later convictions. A strong, proud man who loved freedom, Leadbelly spent 12 years behind bars in three states and twice escaped prison—once from a chain gang, after which he fled to another state and became ``Walter Boyd'' for many years. The singer's prison nickname of ``Leadbelly'' referred to his manliness; and though he learned the value of gentleness in building up ``good time'' for early release from prison, Leadbelly's dude-like aura (even in starched overalls) drew women wherever he played. Leadbelly's genius for folk music flowered long before the blues and jazz crazes of the 20's. In fact, the authors show, imprisonment kept his work pure as he fed from pre-radio springs such as the lives of his fellow prisoners. Following Leadbelly's death, his ``Goodnight, Irene'' became a gargantuan hit—though he'd never been a moneymaker while alive. By deflating the myth, Wolfe and Lornell allow Leadbelly to fill the page with his real and powerful presence. (Eight pages of b&w photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Dec. 2, 1992
ISBN: 0-06-016862-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
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
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