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BOWIE'S BOOKSHELF

Name: BOWIE'S BOOKSHELF
Author: John O'Connell
ISBN: 978-1-982112-54-7

THE HUNDRED BOOKS THAT CHANGED DAVID BOWIE'S LIFE

by John O'Connell illustrated by Luis Paadín ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 12, 2019

An enlightening if imperfectly conceived look at Bowie’s eclectic bookshelf.

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A peek into the psyche of one of rock’s most inscrutable figures through the books that had the strongest impact on him.

In 2013, London’s Victoria & Albert Museum hosted an exhibition, “David Bowie Is,” for which the star drafted a list of the 100 books that had influenced him. O’Connell, a veteran music journalist, gamely delivers brief essays on each title, with context on what influence Bowie might have drawn from them. This is sometimes a tall order. Many of Bowie’s selections speak to his obvious passion for music, especially early rock ’n’ roll and R&B (Greil Marcus, Gerri Hershey), his famous Japanophilia (Yukio Mishima, Tadanori Yokoo), and his stint in Germany (Alfred Döblin, Otto Friedrich). There are a few surprising anecdotes—e.g., Alberto Denti di Pirajno’s obscure 1956 memoir, A Grave for a Dolphin directly inspired Bowie’s classic song “Heroes.” But many of Bowie’s selections don’t lend themselves to such cause-and-effect treatment. The best O’Connell can make of Bowie’s affection for Frank Norris’ McTeague and William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying is that teeth feature prominently and Bowie had dental implants; he can only speculate that Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard appealed for its story of a giant in decline. That straining for meaning suggests that this project might better have been approached thematically rather than book by book. Exploring Bowie’s interest in transgressive literature by Hubert Selby, Mikhail Bulgakov, Jack Kerouac, and John Rechy needn’t require extensive plot summaries of each novel; numerous books on divided selves speak collectively to Bowie’s career-long shape-shifting (and his late schizophrenic half brother). Still, O’Connell’s approach does underscore the range and playfulness in Bowie’s reading, from hefty tomes on the Russian Revolution to laddish comic books like The Beano.

An enlightening if imperfectly conceived look at Bowie’s eclectic bookshelf.

Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-982112-54-7

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | ENTERTAINMENT, SPORTS & CELEBRITY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)