by Harry Shapiro & Caesar Glebbeek ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 22, 1991
Definitive biography of the giant of the electric guitar, who died in 1970 at age 27. Shapiro is a British music-writer, while Glebbeek runs the Hendrix Information Service. Shapiro and Glebbeek provide the most detailed story of Hendrix yet written, getting down to as day-by-day as possible, especially in logging his itineraries around the States, England, and Europe. The appendices fill 200 pages and list every guitar Hendrix ever owned, every piece he ever recorded, every film and book about him, and more—everything the guitar-playing Hendrix- freak would want to know. The text never flags, is journeyman without brilliance, features endless piecemeal interviews and statements. The book makes firm that Hendrix was the most passionate, inspired, innovative electric guitarist of this century, a Paganini of agility and amperage. He was oddly shy, a black among whites and had no black following, no black fellow players among the tribes of rock—and yet was the greatest rock player of his day, although he disliked a rock label, a blues label, or any label. Unlike the Beatles, Hendrix's Experience trio never played anything the same way twice, even his own songs. His brief life put him forever on the move, away from his family in Seattle and into the paratroopers, away from Harlem to Greenwich Village and the pop scene, away from Manhattan to London to establish his own group and start recording. Hendrix slept with his guitar as if with a woman, jammed every moment possible, thought in a flaming cloud of music. The authors think his barbiturate death an accident. You'll dig out the four albums Hendrix made before dying—and again find him a crackling wizard. (For a more musiculturally oriented view of Hendrix's life, see Charles Murray's Crosstown Traffic, 1990.) (Seventy-five b&w photographs, 16 pp. of color photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: July 22, 1991
ISBN: 0-312-05861-6
Page Count: 736
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1991
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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
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
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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...
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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