An episode of “Behind the Music” would tell you more about Johnny Cash than this lazy rehash.
Barely six months after the country singer’s death, a superficial biography by music writer Campbell.
The legendary Johnny Cash (1932–2003) had his first success as one of Sun Records’ genre-smashing rockabilly singers in the mid-’50s, and he was still defying boundaries at the turn of the 21st century with a series of stark, folk-inflected albums produced by hip-hop icon Rick Rubin. Born in rural Arkansas during the depths of the Depression, he grew up in a poor, tightly knit, God-fearing family and always remained true to his country roots and the southern audiences that shared them. But Cash was also a friend of Bob Dylan’s, a quiet opponent of the war in Vietnam, a mentor through his TV show to many ’70s singer-songwriters, and for many years (before second wife June Carter straightened him out) a pill-popping junkie as self-destructive and enraged as any punk rocker. He was a complicated, sophisticated man pursued by personal demons Campbell’s worshipful account does nothing to illuminate. Nor does the author provide any insights into Cash’s music, firmly rooted in country traditions yet always innovative and new, from the Mexican brass on his 1963 hit “Ring of Fire” to his transformation of the Nine Inch Nails’ song “Hurt” into a searing personal statement in 2002. Campbell seems more interested in image than sound, declaring of the career-rejuvenating American Recordings album, “Johnny Cash had become the sort of hard-bitten desperado that even a fifteen-year-old heavy metal fan could adore.” About the perils of fame he has nothing more interesting to say than, “Johnny Cash knew all about the pressures of stardom. He’d found it all incredibly hard to cope with.” The basic facts of Cash’s life are here for neophyte fans, but this work utterly lacks cultural context or meaningful psychological insights.
An episode of “Behind the Music” would tell you more about Johnny Cash than this lazy rehash.Pub Date: April 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-84454-033-2
Page Count: 275
Publisher: John Blake/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2004
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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