A compelling look back at the rock ’n’ roll era, and a cautionary tale for today’s pop-star wannabes. (50 b&w photos)
A rueful memoir by the uniquely British blues stylist Burdon, a Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Famer, depicting his chaotic 35+-year career.
The forthright Burdon first notes that his youthful combo was “fucked from the get-go,” unprepared for the “vampires of the music business.” Still, his early years with the original Animals are recalled with a romantic shine. Forming within the heady, early-1960s British blues cult that arose in unlikely locales like working-class Newcastle, influenced by early tours with Gene Vincent, John Lee Hooker, Chuck Berry, and Jerry Lee Lewis, and fueled by drugs and internal competitiveness, the Animals hit the top of the charts in 1964 with “House of the Rising Sun.” Foolishly, however, the band assigned the rights to a single member, who together with the thuggish management withheld most of the profits. Such incidents divided the Animals and dogged Burdon’s career. His music was bootlegged; he fought with and eventually picketed MGM Records; and he got mixed up in a scuttled film starring his friend Jimi Hendrix, whose last days are portrayed in jarring detail. But he remains proud of his most prescient moves, from his early psychedelic performance with the New Animals at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival to his appearance as the first Western rocker to perform in Russia to his continuing passion for racial justice. Though his libertarian attitudes toward the era’s recreational sex and drugs make him appear an unreconstructed Boomer-rocker archetype, many stories strike humorous or poignant notes, as when a refugee from the Bosnian conflict tells him that his music “was the best thing for escape from dying and crying.” This theme of haunted survival (e.g., in the Animals’ most enduring song, “We Gotta Get Out of This Place”) epitomizes Burdon’s life as it emerges here.
A compelling look back at the rock ’n’ roll era, and a cautionary tale for today’s pop-star wannabes. (50 b&w photos)Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-56025-330-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2001
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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