bookshelf

JOHN PRINE

Name: JOHN PRINE
Author: Eddie Huffman
ISBN: 978-0-292-74822-4

IN SPITE OF HIMSELF

by Eddie Huffman ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 15, 2015

It’s difficult for Huffman to establish much stylistic continuity when he relies so heavily on quotes from other...

bookshelf

A guide to the troubadour’s career lacks access to the artist himself but benefits from a subject who is as intriguing as his songs.

In his first book, Greensboro News & Record staff writer Huffman proves an amiable companion as he leads readers though the musical development of an artist whose songwriting uniqueness has prevailed over a decided lack of ambition and decades of commercial indifference. If it weren’t for his close friend and fellow troubadour Steve Goodman, who “had enough ambition for both of them,” Prine might have been happy to remain the singing mailman from suburban Chicago. The author shows just how little Prine enjoyed the business side of the music business and how the strength of his songwriting offset raw indifference as a singer and guitarist in his early studio recordings. More than once he was willing to chuck his career for something different. He never believed the critical claims made by others on his behalf: “If I’m a genius, how come it took me five years to get out of high school?” he told an AP reporter in 1978. “If I’m a genius, how come I don’t have three Cadillacs?” It might have seemed that Prine was destined to be known primarily from the songs on his 1971 debut album—“Sam Stone,” “Hello in There,” “Angel from Montgomery”—with subsequent efforts doing little to raise his profile as he bounced from one record label to another. Yet he amazingly rebounded in 1991 with “The Missing Years,” his most popular album ever and a return to critical acclaim. By then, Prine had started his own label and found domestic bliss with his third wife, and he has subsequently survived a couple bouts with cancer. If he’s lost the inspiration to write songs, that doesn’t seem to bother him much.

It’s difficult for Huffman to establish much stylistic continuity when he relies so heavily on quotes from other journalists, but the unlikely success of the reluctant performer makes for fascinating reading.

Pub Date: March 15, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-292-74822-4

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Univ. of Texas

Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2015

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | ENTERTAINMENT, SPORTS & CELEBRITY

bookshelf

THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

bookshelf

Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

bookshelf

INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

bookshelf

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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)