Amid the glut of music veteran memoirs, this holds more interest than most, though Stewart admits that he isn’t very...
A rock star who realizes that he’s a very lucky man shares how he made his own luck.
Most music fans think of Stewart as the lesser partner in Eurythmics, a duo that owed much of its success to the voice, allure, and songs of Annie Lennox. Yet it was Stewart’s anything-goes adventurism that coaxed the best from Lennox, as he served not only as the sounding board who provided the music, but also the duo’s producer and manager. The most fascinating part of this memoir illuminates the complex relationship the author continues to enjoy with the woman he calls “my dearest friend and closest collaborator,” though what began as a love-at-first-sight romantic relationship was ending even as the two were shifting from the Tourists, their first band together, into the collaboration that would become the Eurythmics. “It’s not easy, this transition from lovers to something else,” writes Stewart. “How do you break up when you’re still together?” Yet just as the contrast between the impetuous Stewart and the more reserved Lennox caused personal tension, their success proceeded from equally disparate elements: “We wanted to create the feeling of beauty and sadness together, like in a garden when the roses have just peaked and are turning blood red—a kind of sweet decay.” Soul and folk, acoustic and synthesized, organic and experimental—“every song became a sonic collage.” His approach also found success beyond the Eurythmics, with Tom Petty scoring big with “Don’t Come Around Here No More,” a song Stewart relates he started after falling into and out of bed with Stevie Nicks. His creative and social orbit eventually included various Beatles, Bob Dylan, Jack Nicholson, and Microsoft’s Paul Allen, though after the Eurythmics, the memoir starts to read, as he quotes an early responder, like “a hell of a cast” in search of a story.
Amid the glut of music veteran memoirs, this holds more interest than most, though Stewart admits that he isn’t very reflective and he too rarely goes deeper than surface anecdote.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-47768-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: NAL/Berkley
Review Posted Online: Dec. 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2015
PROFILES
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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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