Despite covering well-trodden ground, the graceful prose and superb storytelling create a riveting narrative.
Solid addition to the ever-expanding library of books about the Beatle named Paul.
Like Peter Carlin’s Paul McCartney: A Life (2009) and unlike Barry Miles’ Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now, this biography by Sounes (The Wicked Game: Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus, Tiger Woods, and the Story of Modern Golf, 2004, etc.), a Londoner who has also written bios of Bob Dylan and Charles Bukowski, was neither sanctioned nor supported by McCartney. It includes interviews with friends, family, business associates and even groupies to round out the reliance on secondary material. Fab is nearly twice as long as Carlin’s book, though it covers roughly the same period and events: McCartney’s mostly happy childhood in working-class Liverpool, rapid rise to iconic stature as a rock star, bitter divorce from Heather Mills and triumphant return to a Liverpool stage during the city’s reign as European Capital of Culture in 2008. The extra volume may be due to Sounes’s obsessive research—more than 200 interviews—and no-nonsense attention to detail. The portrait of McCartney that emerges is not only that of a talented and occasionally visionary musician but of a brilliant and often lucky businessman. On the negative side, McCartney comes across as arrogant, controlling, intolerant of dissent, a mean and stingy boss, humorless when challenged or criticized, and too much of a pothead to care. Sounes doesn’t hide his low opinion of McCartney’s post-Beatles repertoire, particularly in the lyric department. His sources agree: McCartney was at his best given a partner who gave as good as he (or she) got—someone like John Lennon or George Martin. The result of being Lennonless was the indecisive overproduction and sappy songs of Wings and the solo period during the ’80s. Family-centric living and superhuman wealth probably also inhibited the ex-Beatle’s genius, but the pain of losing Lennon, his dear wife Linda and George Harrison—not to mention the humiliation of the Mills affair—seems to have reawakened the bard and decent bloke within.
Despite covering well-trodden ground, the graceful prose and superb storytelling create a riveting narrative.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-306-81783-0
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
SEEN & HEARD
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