Perfect for Yoakam fans looking for a book-length critical defense of his work.
Music critic McLeese (Journalism/Univ. of Iowa; The New York Times Reader: Arts & Culture, 2010, etc.) examines the career of iconoclastic country star Dwight Yoakam.
The author informs us early on that this book is not intended to be a biography, but rather “an extended piece of music and culture criticism.” Of course, McLeese provides some biographical detail, mainly as an entry into how Yoakam’s upbringing and experiences have informed his work. Of particular interest to the author, clearly a fan of his subject, is the musician’s childhood fascination with television and especially the Monkees, influences that led Yoakam to Los Angeles, where his career began. Though his earliest support came, oddly, from that city’s punk-music scene, it’s clear that Yoakam had his sights set on Nashville stardom from the beginning. The book often reads as a refutation of the charge that Yoakam, because he paid attention to his image and put on a good show, and later pursued an acting career, is somehow less “authentic” an artist because of it. Though McLeese does a fine job countering that idea, his focus on it over 200-plus pages begins to feel defensive. The narrative benefits from the author’s extensive access to Yoakam and his collaborators, most notably longtime guitarist and producer Pete Anderson, as it proceeds album by album through his career. Context on the country-music industry and how it has changed during Yoakam’s time, particularly B.G. and A.G. (before and after the rise of Garth Brooks in the early 1990s), adds depth to what might otherwise read as an extended magazine article.
Perfect for Yoakam fans looking for a book-length critical defense of his work.Pub Date: March 15, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-292-72381-8
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Univ. of Texas
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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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