An effective biography that demonstrates Odetta’s wide, deep legacy.
One of the leading voices of the mid-20th-century folk revival receives her biographical due.
In a narrative that is both effectively researched and engagingly readable, Zack (Say No to the Devil: The Life and Musical Genius of Rev. Gary Davis, 2015) is convincing in his argument that Odetta Holmes (1930-2008) has been underappreciated for too long, and he shows how and why her reign as the “Queen of Folk” was over before folk music hit its commercial peak. When folk music, progressive politics, and the civil rights movement were forging a unity of conviction in the 1950s, the young Odetta was clearly the right artist at the right time, with a moral fervor in her powerful lower register that could bring audiences to their knees. She wasn’t threatening in the manner of ex-convict Lead Belly, and she hadn’t suffered the blacklisting taint of Pete Seeger and other more overtly leftist singers. With her regal bearing and impressive vocal talents, Odetta proved inspirational to audiences and fellow artists alike. “When I first heard her…my knees went to jelly,” said Joan Baez, who then rose to fame as younger white performers began to find the commercial success that had eclipsed anything Odetta had achieved—and deserved. Their success made her bitter, and she felt that even her longtime manager, Albert Grossman, had betrayed her. Odetta charged that as the first client managed by the man who would become a legend with a stable including Bob Dylan and Peter, Paul, and Mary, he “built his business on my back and I never benefited from it.” Stronger management might well have nurtured her potential as an actress and helped her to navigate the sea changes of the 1970s through the end of the century, when her performing draw diminished and her recording career stalled. She also battled alcohol addiction and was often branded as difficult offstage. Regardless of her struggles, Zack brings her back into the spotlight.
An effective biography that demonstrates Odetta’s wide, deep legacy.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-8070-3532-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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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