Skip it and read Life instead.
Journalist and best-selling celebrity biographer Andersen (William and Kate: A Royal Love Story, 2010, etc.) brings his taste for the titillating tales of British royalty to this breezy, shamelessly shallow recap of rock god Mick Jagger’s life so far.
Not surprisingly, considering Jagger’s well-known lack of interest in his autobiography, the author didn’t spend any time talking to the subject of his book. He lifts all Jagger quotes from other sources, as well as those of Jagger’s band mates, family and closest friends. (Much of Andersen’s description of Jagger’s boyhood hometown seems to have relied heavily on Keith Richards’ memoir, Life.) Andersen tried to make up for this lack of cooperation from the immediate circle by speaking to scores of the star’s past lovers and business associates, including Marianne Faithfull, Bianca Jagger, Andrew Oldham and the late Ahmet Ertegun of Atlantic Records. The author does well enough with the material he had to work with, giving the story all the verve of a 300-page People story. (He was once senior editor at that celebrity-celebrating weekly.) Readers who know nothing about Jagger or the Rolling Stones will get the basic story: the development of Jagger’s iconic androgyny, the drug busts, Altamont, the tax exile, the knighthood, the brotherly love and rivalry between Jagger and Richards, and the women—especially the women. Readers will eventually realize that Jagger’s sex life has been vastly more important to his identity, if not his fame, than his career as an artist. Those who know something about Jagger and care about rock ’n’ roll will learn little from this book.
Skip it and read Life instead.Pub Date: July 10, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-6144-6
Page Count: 372
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 21, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2012
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.
