Informative, compelling and gleefully, unapologetically tendentious.
Sympathetic, admiring biography of the talent scout and record producer who helped propel into popularity such legendary performers as Billie Holiday, Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen.
In his debut, Prial begins and ends with his sighting of John Hammond (1910–87) at a 1984 Carnegie Hall concert. The author argues that Hammond was “eerily prescient” in his recognition of talent: “He seemed to know what America wanted to hear before America knew it.” Hammond came from big Vanderbilt bucks (on his mother’s side), but he dropped out of Yale to pursue his true love—jazz. Prial portrays him as an anomaly: a dapper white man (he invariably sported a blazer and a crew cut) who hung out in Harlem and befriended musicians who would become some of the biggest names in jazz history, including Holiday, Benny Goodman and Count Basie. Hammond was also a devoted leftist; many performers recall him sitting in a studio corner reading stacks of liberal/radical magazines, and he gained early fame writing about the Scottsboro case for the Nation. The author credits his subject for integrating popular music: It was Hammond’s constant lobbying that convinced Goodman, for example, to hire gifted black musicians Teddy Wilson and Lionel Hampton to make his orchestra the first racially mixed band. A remarkably generous man as well, he never negotiated producer’s royalties and never expressed any subsequent regrets, despite the phenomenal success of some of his protégés. (A grateful Springsteen sang a Dylan song at his funeral.) Prial does not dwell on Hammond’s failed first marriage, nor on his reputation as “less than a doting father,” preferring to emphasize his professional achievements. He wasn’t a producer in the contemporary sense (his studio style was laissez-faire) and as a talent-meister he was occasionally wrong (the Nutty Squirrels never caught on), but the man who nurtured and promoted iconic artists from the 1930s through the ’80s gets from Prial the respect he deserves.
Informative, compelling and gleefully, unapologetically tendentious.Pub Date: July 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-374-11304-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2006
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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