The brief life of the legendary Texas blues-guitarist, well told by Patoski (a senior editor at Texas Monthly) and writer/radio producer Crawford, both of whom live in Austin and saw dozens of Vaughan concerts. Raised around Dallas, Vaughan (1954-90) was a guitar prodigy whose greatest influence was his older brother Jimmie, also a guitarist. Whatever musical instrument Jimmie tried to play, Vaughan was sure to imitate him, and as his brother got better instruments, Stevie played Jimmie's electric hand-me-downs. At ten, Vaughan already was feeding on the legends of Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, Johnny Ace, and Bobby ``Blue'' Bland. Determined to make a living off his guitar, he quit school and took his group to Austin, which was then a mirror of the hippie paradise in San Francisco. Even so, Vaughan was neck-deep in low self-esteem and forever hid behind his guitar, but as his powers became more widely known, his intensity as a musician only deepened: During one gig, after playing his finger callus off down to the quick, he borrowed some Superglue, glued the callus back on, and went on with the show. Vaughan played blues with all the giants, from Eric Clapton to Jeff Beck, but eventually drugs and booze numbed the soul out of his playing. At 32, glazed and whacked out, he went to a Georgia rehab, then—with a hand from fellow recoverer Clapton—made a fabulous comeback, remaining sober to his last breath. Just before his death in a helicopter crash, following a concert with Clapton and some fellow legends, he made a record with brother Jimmie, their first together. Released less than three weeks after Vaughan's death, Family Style instantly zapped the charts. Patoski and Crawford do an exceptionally strong job on Vaughan's final three years sober, his early fears, and his huge comeback. (Thirty-five b&w photographs)
Pub Date: May 27, 1993
ISBN: 0-316-16068-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1993
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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