Unrevealing bio of the lead singer of the Rolling Stones. Though he dutifully gives us Jagger's story from its narrow middle-class beginnings onward, Seay (Stairway to Heaven, 1986) fails to get close to his subject or to develop a convincing thesis about Jagger's character. Moreover, he writes superficially (``Stardom was about to change [Jagger's] life forever, but his essential character, stripped of his charisma, would remain unchanged'') and with mistakes (Seay hails ``The Last Time'' as the Stones' first truly authentic tune when it's clearly derived from the Staple Singers' song of the same name). Quotes from Jagger- -culled mostly from other sources—often fail to enlighten, though they tend to confirm some critics' contention that he's vacuous. Wading through the moral mine field the Stones represent, Seay vacillates between griping at the group's mores and worshipping their music—especially the energetic versions of classic blues the band cut its teeth on. Meanwhile, he seems to find Bianca Jagger's gold-digging and revealing blouses as reprehensible as the Stones' most overinflated excesses (which at places like Altamont resulted in misery and even death). Seay's chronicle momentarily catches fire, though, in describing the mayhem of early Stones shows; in touching upon the late Brian Jones's contributions to the Stones' music (cf. Laura Jackson's Golden Stone, reviewed above); and in an extended riff about the way the group's youthful audience embraced the song ``Satisfaction.'' Otherwise, even as it hints at Jagger's bisexuality or notes his eagerness to join Britain's upper crust, Seay's very linear narrative rarely pauses for the kind of sustained analysis that might reveal the pop star to readers. You won't get no satisfaction here. (Sixteen pages of photographs—not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1993
ISBN: 1-55972-192-8
Page Count: 310
Publisher: Birch Lane Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1993
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
SEEN & HEARD
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