Some choice nuggets hidden among an uneven “reference” book.
Not the comprehensive reference the title promises, but a long-winded volume of music criticism by journalist Jones (When Ziggy Played Guitar: David Bowie and Four Minutes that Shook the World, 2012, etc.), editor of the U.K. version of GQ.
The author has written a number of books about music and musicians, mostly of the rock variety. Coming-of-age just about when punk and new wave livened up the music scene in Britain and around the world, Jones shows off his intricate familiarity, particularly with London scenesters from ABC to X-Ray Spex. His tastes, though, seem to have grown more conservative and a bit broader to encompass some jazz, hip-hop and schmaltzy pop. “Like many critics, I tend to have an aversion to any hysterical celebration of the new and the fashionable,” writes Jones in the opening of his entry on Gary Numan, “often choosing to be contrary just for the hell of it.” This self-conscious awareness of how his words will be taken continues throughout the book, which is not so much a biographical dictionary of popular music as an autobiographical dictionary about pop music’s relationship to Jones. The hapless buyer who takes the title seriously and expects a reference book will learn this, and only this, about Crosby, Stills & Nash: “A varnished log cabin.” The next entry, for Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, reads in its entirety, “A varnished log cabin with an unvarnished door.” On Genesis: “ ‘The Carpet Crawlers’ and ‘Los Endos’ are officially the two Genesis songs you’re allowed to like.” Jones is witty and enjoyable enough in small doses, but the book is filled with odd choices. One of the longest entries is on actress Shirley MacLaine, who gets 13 pages, while Aretha Franklin receives no mention (other than brief appearances in the entries on Michael Hutchence and Dave Stewart).
Some choice nuggets hidden among an uneven “reference” book.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-250-03186-0
Page Count: 912
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2012
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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