Let the reader be forewarned, El Sid is often obscene, violent and disturbing, but then, so was the life of its protagonist;...
Wildly uneven but ultimately compelling, Dalton's chronicle of Sid Vicious's (John Simon Ritchie) years as the bassist in the Sex Pistols covers little new factual ground but offers a fresh angle on a widely misunderstood young man.
Dalton's interest is in more than just telling of Sid's decline and fall. Instead, he places punk in its cultural and historical context, with the sun slowly setting on England's empire, widespread unemployment, and aimless youth like Sid wandering London's King's Road. Enter entrepreneur and lounge lizard Malcolm McClaren, who opens a boutique called Sex to cater to the jaded youths and then forms the Sex Pistols to promote his wares. Using the cerebral, charismatic, homeless Johnny Rotten (Lydon) as the centerpiece of his band, McClaren finds Lydon bringing his friend Sid along for the ride. The thought-driven Rotten and action-oriented Vicious give a jump-start to punk music, and the rest, as they say, is history. While Dalton (who has written biographies of Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, and other pop cult figures) does a fine job of showing how the disparate personalities of McClaren, Lydon, and Sid played off one another, with Lydon being too smart to fall into the trap that killed Sid, the author relies throughout the book on the strange technique of presenting the bassist in, presumably, his own words in boxed quotes randomly placed throughout the text. And while Dalton tries all along to approximate the Cockney slang he supposes Sid must have spoken, a prison letter from Sid included in the book belies his conceit and his underestimation of Sid's intelligence. Still, Sid's presence in the book is ultimately what tells the story of the Sex Pistols.
Let the reader be forewarned, El Sid is often obscene, violent and disturbing, but then, so was the life of its protagonist; at least the typical glamorization of Sid Vicious is avoided.Pub Date: Aug. 11, 1997
ISBN: 0-312-15520-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1997
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
