Clemons imparts a warm, Indian summer feeling that deftly accompanies his rollicking reminiscences, making this a must for...
Bruce Springsteen’s ebullient saxophonist and onstage foil recounts nearly four decades of the rock ’n’ roll life, assisted by best friend Reo, a TV writer and producer.
This account, the first by a member of the E Street Band, is “not a standard memoir,” the authors warn. Half the chapters can be taken literally, but the rest, labeled “Legends,” feature imagined conversations, altered times and places and more—just what a musician might offer up in the long hours on the road, fueled by Jack Daniels and other mind-altering substances, many of which Clemons cops to consuming over the years. Among the luminaries in these droll, quasi-fictional encounters are Thomas Pynchon, Frank Sinatra, Norman Mailer, Redd Foxx, Fidel Castro, Robert DeNiro, Bob Dylan and Groucho Marx. Clemons demonstrates that he might be every bit the raconteur that the Boss is in concert. For example, he describes how, in 1972 gig at Sing Sing Prison, the band escaped with their lives after their musical equipment blew out by jamming for an hour with just sax and drums. Fans will find especially fascinating the Big Man’s account of the marathon Born to Run (1975) recording, the early road groupies and at least some of his five wives, the ornate touring sanctuary known as the “Temple of Soul” and the E Street Band’s late organist, Danny Federici, who was given to such hijinks as running down hotel corridors naked. Any resentment lingering from Springsteen’s 1989 decision to break up the band—a decision happily rescinded several years later—has dissipated, leaving only gratitude to a friend responsible for the best years of the author’s life.
Clemons imparts a warm, Indian summer feeling that deftly accompanies his rollicking reminiscences, making this a must for the legion of fans that he and the Boss have accumulated over the decades.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-446-54626-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2009
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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