A standout addition to the crowded shelf of recollections by the underground iconoclasts of the 1980s and ’90s.
A charming, knowledgeable memoir by an esteemed first-generation indie-rock musician.
Stamey, a founding member of the dBs, exemplifies the underground rock veteran whose influence outweighs their commercial fortunes, and this debut is a rich recounting of his personal and musical narratives. The author’s passion comes through in the book’s organization, which combines personal chronology with the associations attached to a “jukebox” of significant songs. Although he captures his shoestring musical beginnings during a bohemian North Carolina upbringing, he writes, “it was always New York. My life before Manhattan seemed simply a coiling before the leap north.” He vividly depicts the creative ferment and rough edges of New York in the late 1970s. Proximity to legendary venues like CBGB fueled his ambition, as did the innovative music being made by acquaintances like Television and Alex Chilton. “It was a time when lines were being drawn in pop music culture,” he writes. Stamey found that underground musicians could eke out a living, despite major label disinterest, due to a growing network of low-budget studios and the first regional independent record labels: “Suddenly there was just enough money changing hands to bring managers into the act.” This allowed bands like the dBs to tour worldwide and release albums, developing a cult following, particularly after their friends in R.E.M. broke through. Yet Stamey felt constricted as a songwriter by the band he’d started. “It was not a tabloid breakup,” he writes, also noting that “it didn’t seem to come as a surprise to the rest.” This indeed allowed him to broaden his horizons, both as a recording artist and as a producer of artists like Yo La Tengo and Ryan Adams. The author deftly combines a wry, self-effacing tone with clear, precise discussions of the intricacies of songwriting and production and the surreal transformations of the industry, remaining positive and thoughtful throughout.
A standout addition to the crowded shelf of recollections by the underground iconoclasts of the 1980s and ’90s.Pub Date: April 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4773-1622-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Univ. of Texas
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
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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