Both the Haggard fanatic and the casual country music fan will find their appreciation enriched.
An incisive, critical analysis of one of the most complicated and misunderstood artists in country music.
Cantwell describes this as “the attempt of this critic and more or less lifelong Merle Haggard fan at writing a monograph on the man’s music,” admitting that this is not the in-depth, full-scale biography that his subject deserves. As the co-author of Heartaches by the Number: Country Music's 500 Greatest Singles (2003), Cantwell combines sharp critical insights and encyclopedic knowledge of the music with a fan’s passion, as he provides a personal engagement with Haggard’s discography, along with context of the times. The author shows how the politics of the man most famous for “Okie from Muskogee” and the more belligerent “Fightin’ Side of Me” resist pigeonholing and how many contradictions one confronts in his music. He’s a country artist who served time but sang of prison less often than singers who never did. He’s a country artist who sings often of the city and refuses to romanticize the bucolic. He recognizes that the term “Okie” (which he isn’t, though his parents were) is an insult before he turns it into a source of pride (and Cantwell is very good at illuminating the fragility and ambiguity of the pride running through Haggard’s music). Occasionally, the assessment seems a little over-the-top, as the author writes that on his late-’60s albums, “Haggard’s writing is as smart in its way as Dylan’s at the same time or Lennon and McCartney’s, his singing is as powerful as Aretha Franklin’s or Van Morrison’s,” and he proceeds to encompass the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix and James Brown in his comparative superlatives. But for an artist who has been dismissed too easily for too long, such perspective provides a dialogue-opening corrective.
Both the Haggard fanatic and the casual country music fan will find their appreciation enriched.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-292-71771-8
Page Count: 244
Publisher: Univ. of Texas
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2013
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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