A dishy but overstuffed and overly praiseful portrait.
A sweeping, gossipy biography of the chameleonic pop star in the form of an oral history, with input from dozens of collaborators, lovers, and admirers.
Bowie himself weighs in, too, as longtime music journalist and British GQ editor Jones (Elvis Has Left the Building: The Day the King Died, 2014, etc.) scored excellent access to Bowie and his cohort. However, Bowie’s contributions are mostly gnomic pronouncements—e.g., “my art has little to do with trends, and nothing at all to do with style.” For details (and dirt), Jones finds producers Tony Visconti and Brian Eno, who weigh in on Bowie’s approach to recording (game for anything but impatient); fashion and music journalists, who were wowed by his path-breaking 1970s performances; his first wife, Angie, who had an embattled relationship with the singer as he deeply indulged in sex and cocaine in the mid-’70s. (Deep Purple’s Glenn Hughes recalls “so many girls coming and going one by one, nonstop.”) Bowie’s musical output after the early 1980s is generally dismissed as cravenly commercial and/or lazy, but Jones’ interlocutors tend to argue even Bowie’s miscues reflect the same seeking spirit that produced “Ziggy Stardust”; he just became more interested in acting and art collecting and had settled down with his second wife, Iman. Jones unearths quirky bits of Bowie-ana (he wanted to sing a duet with Mick Jagger from a space shuttle) and details his highly creative months preceding his death from cancer in 2016. But the occupational hazard of oral histories is that they lack broader context, and a hermetically sealed, accentuate-the-positive feel intensifies in closing pages thick with encomiums—though the author does make room for critic Paul Gorman’s assessment: “he made execrable records during 1984-1995, often wore terrible clothes, stupid makeup and had rotten haircuts.” Jones captures his subject’s transformations and the responses they provoked, but the tone is fan-friendly, assuming Bowie's greatness rather than arguing for it.
A dishy but overstuffed and overly praiseful portrait.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-451-49783-3
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Crown Archetype
Review Posted Online: June 13, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017
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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