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THE MAYOR OF MACDOUGAL STREET

Name: THE MAYOR OF MACDOUGAL STREET
Author: Dave Van Ronk
ISBN: 0-306-81407-2

A MEMOIR

by Dave Van Ronk with Elijah Wald ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2005

A must for those with an interest in the music, and of great appeal as well for anyone who enjoys a roistering life story...

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Charming, evocative autobiography by one of the key figures in the mid-20th-century folk revival.

The charisma, humor and storytelling chops that made Dave Van Ronk (1936–2002) a Greenwich Village legend are abundantly on display in this memoir, assembled after his death by long-time friend and blues historian Wald. A blue-collar boy from the outer boroughs, Van Ronk dropped out of “Our Lady of Perpetual Bingo” at 15 and headed to the Village to hang out with anarchists and Wobblies. He began his musical life as a jazz fanatic convinced that “folk music was irredeemably square.” But Harry Smith’s paradigm-altering Anthology of American Folk Music in 1951 introduced Van Ronk and a lot of other “neo-ethnics” to the astonishing diversity of traditional American music. They aimed to play it with “authenticity,” scorning the bland sounds of pop-folk acts like the Kingston Trio. Nor did they initially have much interest in writing their own material; among Van Ronk’s many shrewd observations is the reminder that what we now think of as folk music—a singer-songwriter performing self-penned compositions accompanied by an acoustic guitar—is what it was changed into during the ’60s by artists like Tom Paxton, Phil Ochs and Bob Dylan. Big names like Dylan’s enter late in Van Ronk’s narrative, which focuses on the fruitful, unpublicized early years when everyone scraped by with occasional jobs while playing for tips in all-night coffee shops, doing a lot of drinking and dope smoking on the side. It sounds like wonderful fun, and Van Ronk bestrews his pages with sharp, intelligent asides on such matters as the divide between the Cambridge, Mass., folk crowd, who viewed themselves as “pure guardians of the sacred flame” and the more professional singers of the Village, who viewed them as “upper-middle-class kids cutting a dash on papa’s cash.”

A must for those with an interest in the music, and of great appeal as well for anyone who enjoys a roistering life story recounted in a lively narrative voice.

Pub Date: May 1, 2005

ISBN: 0-306-81407-2

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Da Capo

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2005

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | POLITICAL & ROYALTY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)