Initially thrilling but finally artless, with little for the casual fan.
The cute Beatle may not have been quite so cuddly.
Sandford (Keith Richards, 2004, etc.) rejects the idea that among the Beatles, John Lennon was the caustic poet of depth and insight while Paul, though he may have had a knack for good tunes, was more interested in commerce than art. Sandford’s by-the-numbers bio comes up with plenty of evidence to support the idea that McCartney was much more of an innovator than generally credited: He basically invented the concept album, he was an early acolyte of John Cage and he pioneered the use of found sound, tape loops and other avant-garde standards. This insight alone, however, isn’t sufficient to justify yet another McCartney book. Starting off, rather oddly, with the musician’s 1980 bust for pot in Japan, Sandford then hops back to Liverpool in the 1930s, where Jim McCartney was a local hit as the head of a rollicking dancehall band. Jim’s son Paul quickly caught the bug, and Sandford dutifully follows the flowering of the teenager’s musical partnership with John, from the Cavern in Liverpool to the Hamburg dives, and to the whirlwind of hit singles and psychotic fans that followed. It’s all well-trammeled ground, and the author at times seems more interested in detailing Paul’s prodigious drug use and legendarily lengthy list of bedmates. Once the Beatles fall apart, Sandford maroons readers in the wasteland of pointless solo albums. Ticking off how many millions were earned with each tour, glossing over the mediocrity of McCartney’s more recent output, he builds little foundation for his conclusion that “we don’t want less of him. We want more.”
Initially thrilling but finally artless, with little for the casual fan.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-7867-1614-2
Page Count: 432
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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