Young and rich, for sure. Dangerous? Hardly.
One of the most successful producers and songwriters in the music business pens a by-the-numbers memoir.
Dupri launched his career by discovering rap duo Kriss Kross, who went on to sell four-million copies of their debut album. He has since worked with such artists as Xscape, Da Brat, TLC, Mariah Carey, Lil Jon, Lil’ Bow Wow, Usher and Janet Jackson (now his girlfriend). He became interested in music at a young age, he writes, after his musician father gave him a drum set; he could pound out beats before he could speak. Dupri began a popular mixtape enterprise in 1986, started an independent label a year later, discovered Kriss Kross at a shopping center a year after that and used the success of their first album to sign a $10 million deal with Columbia—while still in his teens. It’s an impressive success story but not a particularly compelling read. Dupri describes a few arguments with collaborative or competing artists, some difficulties he had with various record labels and a raid by the IRS over money the government said it was owed. None of these episodes are very dramatic—even the IRS raid was resolved by Dupri handing over a check for $2.5 million. It’s commendable that he’s no gangsta, unlike so many hip-hop celebrities, but the man he does reveal just isn’t that interesting. Dupri goes to great pains to describe how wealthy he is, dropping names of designers, labels and car manufacturers, enumerating the houses he has purchased and the jewelry he wears. His memoir reads more like a (very expensive) grocery list than a meaningful account of his life.
Young and rich, for sure. Dangerous? Hardly.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-7432-9980-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2007
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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