For both casual fans and serious aficionados.
Innovator, iconoclast, hipster icon—even today, over a decade since his death, Miles Davis remains one of the most controversial and enigmatic figures in the history of 20th-century music.
Born in 1926, the son of a prosperous dentist, Miles Dewey Davis III was raised in East St. Louis, where he was already playing the trumpet in local dance bands by the time he was a teenager. In addition to being something of a child prodigy, he was a serious student of music and was admitted to Juilliard, although he soon dropped out, finding bebop, a style then beginning to emerge from New York's jazz clubs, more suited to his restless intelligence. After apprenticing with such innovators as Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, he struck out on his own, becoming one of the primary exponents of what became known as “cool” jazz, and his albums, including Birth of the Cool, Kind of Blue, Sketches of Spain, and Bitches Brew, remain among the most popular and influential ever recorded. Davis was a notoriously difficult personality whose relationships with women, other musicians, audiences, and critics were complex and often contentious. Even his death was controversial: officially attributed to a stroke, it was rumored to have been brought on by AIDS, the legacy of a lifetime of on-and-off drug use. Opinions of Davis differ wildly, even among those who knew him, and these divergences, combined with his own tendency toward evasiveness during interviews, makes separating the man from the myth a daunting task. Szwed (Anthropology/Yale; Space Is the Place, 1997) succeeds admirably, however, exploring Davis’s music lucidly and knowledgeably and placing it in a critical and cultural context. His portrait of Davis the man is sympathetic without over-romanticizing the musician’s often troubled life.
For both casual fans and serious aficionados.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-684-85982-3
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2002
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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