Spontaneous and emotive, this biography works like a Seurat painting, a welter of fast dabs that fuse into a mesmeric...
In what amounts to an oral history of Groovy Bob by his friends, documentarian Vyner knits hundreds of interview snippets into an engaging portrait of the 1960s eminence.
Though hardly a household name today, Fraser was a real presence in London’s swinging ’60s. He was a gallery owner, but mostly he was a taste-maker with little regard for legality or survival; he was a groovster, but also a relic of Old Eton and the King’s African Rifles, from whence he sprang. Vyner works her material—interviews, newspaper clippings, letters—like an orchestra conductor, at times bringing the reader to a near-swoon from the whirl of drugs, partying, sex, and lethal hangovers, then lightening the clip and freshening the air with breezy talk of soccer or the art scene. She allows her Fraser authorities to hang themselves with their own rope (Marianne Faithfull: “Mick was wearing a beautiful Mr. Fish jacket which had a face painted on the back, or something incredible, I really can’t remember what, but one of those wonderful silk jackets—perhaps a Michael Rainey jacket”), but mostly they come across as perceptive and articulate. We hear from Keith Richards, Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger, Claes Oldenburg, even J. Paul Getty III—well over 100 contributors in all. They also emerge as type-A, high-octane types for all their laid-back cool, forever shuffling the pecking order. And Groovy Bob? Apparently he was one reckless fellow, self-destructive (he died of AIDS complications in 1986), elusive (especially when it came to paying his artists), brash, addicted, promiscuous, candid, iconic, and (ultimately) rather vacuous. Which is why, perhaps, many folks are going to be asking, “Bob who?”
Spontaneous and emotive, this biography works like a Seurat painting, a welter of fast dabs that fuse into a mesmeric picture. (50 b&w photographs)Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-571-19627-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Faber & Faber/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 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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