A lively compendium of sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll.
An award-winning music journalist compiles a spirited celebration of rock stars.
Hepworth (Never a Dull Moment: 1971, the Year that Rock Exploded, 2016, etc.), media correspondent for the Guardian, laments the demise of the rock star, which occurred at the end of the last century, caused by “the rise of automated percussion, the domination of the committee approach to hit-making, the widespread adoption of choreography, and above all the mystique-destroying rise of the internet.” Rock stars exuded reckless glamour and defiant irreverence. Their predominant qualities included “swagger. Impudence. Sexual charisma,” and “damn-the-torpedoes self-belief.” Now, in the hip-hop generation of social media and streaming music, Hepworth finds no one worthy of the term “rock star,” which may puzzle some fans of Rihanna, Taylor Swift, or Justin Bieber. In 40 year-by-year chapters, the author profiles stars who gleamed in the music firmament from 1955 to 1994, focusing on one day in the performer’s life—sometimes a concert, recording session, or simply a mundane event—to spin out a minibiography. He appends each chapter with a list of 10 songs that were made, released, or became hits that year “in order to give a flavor of the time.” In 1955, for example, when Little Richard came out with his racy “Tutti Frutti,” Frank Sinatra was a hit with “In the Wee Small Hours,” and Lonnie Donegan, with “Rock Island Line.” Simon and Garfunkel, Elton John, and Led Zeppelin represented the range of popular taste in 1970. Rock fans will find the usual suspects, including Elvis Presley, each of the Beatles, Jerry Lee Lewis, Buddy Holly, Mick Jagger, Keith Moon, Jimi Hendrix, Ozzy Osbourne (whose substance abuse got him kicked out of Black Sabbath), Lou Reed, Bruce Springsteen, David Bowie, Michael Jackson, Prince, Axl Rose, and groups including the Rolling Stones, the Who, Duran Duran, and Fleetwood Mac. Janis Joplin and Madonna are among the few women who make it into this encyclopedic volume.
A lively compendium of sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll.Pub Date: Nov. 21, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-12412-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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