Jermaine Jackson sets out to resurrect the tarnished legacy of late superstar brother Michael in an emotionally charged memoir.
“Erms” (Michael’s nickname for Jermaine) had a complex relationship with his brother. There was jealousy, sibling rivalry and professional brinksmanship. A lot went down between the two since first huddling together as starry-eyed innocents at their window overlooking Jackson Street in the 1960s. Ultimately, the gradual degradation of their close relationship led to long periods of estrangement where Michael was alone. Jermaine attempts to present all this in the most positive light, and his enduring love for his doomed brother is evident. But his reliability as an advocate for The King of Pop's more inscrutable behavior remains questionable. According to Jermaine, Michael kept his brothers at arm’s length during much of the baffling metamorphosis he underwent later in life. The author clouds the picture even further at times when it appears he is simply singing his own praises. Jermaine’s narrative works best in recounting the early years of the Jackson 5 when the brothers were undeniably united in a musical dream and Michael was unquestionably the coolest little dude anywhere to command a stage. Even here, though, the seeds of Michael’s downfall loom. The insular nature of the brotherhood itself seemed to preclude outside relationships and produce in Michael an overreliance on a unit that was always destined to change, leaving him adrift when it did. Couple that with the young artist's inability to effectively cope with his growing body dysmorphia, and some of the head-scratching events that followed in MJ's life begin to make more sense. Whether Michael was the victim of twisted, uninformed perceptions of him, as Jermaine steadfastly asserts, or was actually the dangerous eccentric portrayed by the media, the view from 2300 Jackson Street is still tragic. A not entirely convincing but unwavering defense of an unquestionably odd performer, and an intimate look at one of the greatest recording artists of all time.
Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4516-5156-0
Page Count: 464
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2011
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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