A hazily rendered autobiography of the popular 1970s folk singer. Denver was born Henry John Deutschendorf, the self-conscious, withdrawn son of an uptight Air Force pilot; at 50, the singer says, he's still struggling to reach adulthood. With the help of oral historian Tobier, he describes youthful alienation in Montgomery, Ala., and Fort Worth, Tex.; early successes on the L.A. folk music scene and as the composer of ``Leaving on a Jet Plane'' for Peter, Paul, and Mary; and his peripatetic late '60s life as a singer of satirical antiwar songs with the Chad Mitchell Trio. Despite these counterculture credentials, Denver acknowledges that he's rather square—of Mick Jagger's appeal he says, ``Frankly, I just didn't get it.'' That and a certain shyness, along with a string of hits through the mid-'70s, helped make him palatable to enormous numbers of Americans and, later, the unthreatening embodiment of a progressive environmental stance. Denver's attempt to ``define his space'' has drawn him to various New Age phenomena, including Werner Erhard's EST, astrology, and Native American soul retrieval. He has sought to make constructive use of his popularity and wealth, as a member of Jimmy Carter's Commission on World Hunger and founder of Windstar, a Colorado environmental institute. Flashes of self-awareness (``Being `cute' onstage was my way of covering up a fear...of being seen as vacuous'') and clichÇs appear in equal proportion here. Despite confessions of drug use, extramarital affairs, and an angry incident with a chainsaw, the sort of detail that would lend drama to such scenes is generally lacking. Fans may get greatest satisfaction from descriptions of the circumstances that inspired hits like ``Take Me Home, Country Roads'' and ``Rocky Mountain High.'' This may resonate with Denver's still-sizable following but few others. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Nov. 2, 1994
ISBN: 0-517-59537-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1994
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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