Vivid and informative, expressing appreciation grounded in experience.
The adventures of an accidental musical ambassador.
In 1989, Rea, a guitarist whose musical predilections lean in the direction of experimental rock and contemporary jazz, joined his fiancée, a scholar in China, in the city of Chengdu. His thoroughly engaging chronicle takes readers from his first hour in the country, when a taxi driver backed over his guitar, through his almost five years living and traveling in China and Taiwan. The author originally thought he would put his musical career on hold while teaching English, but he eventually played before appreciative audiences, sometimes collaborating with local musicians and later staging concerts with musicians he recruited from Seattle. The narrative never becomes self-serving or self-congratulatory, even though Rea portrays himself as always arriving one step ahead of a trend. Even his move to Seattle, from his home in Utica, N.Y., took place just before Seattle became a hotbed of musical creativity. In early-1990s China, he was an oddity, though since that time the country has hosted tours by megastars such as the Rolling Stones and, to Rea’s dismay, Britney Spears. Beyond the chronicle of his musical exploits, the author expresses considerable appreciation for a seemingly inscrutable culture, even as he describes the Chinese government’s infamous crackdown on protesters in 1989. Thanks to his constant curiosity and a refusal to lapse into prejudice, Rea found doors opening for him. “[O]ne should always be careful not to judge one culture by the standards of another,” he says, and this principle guided him throughout his sojourns. He pays tribute to local musicians, though he observes that people on the mainland, no doubt because of relative material deprivation, seem to be more receptive to challenging music than those in Taiwan. Throughout, Rea employs an agreeably self-deprecating tone and exhibits a musician’s ear for euphony and rhythm.
Vivid and informative, expressing appreciation grounded in experience.Pub Date: May 18, 2006
ISBN: 0-595-39048-X
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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