Lennon and Ono as open and naked as on the cover of Two Virgins.
Rangy and revealing interview/conversations between Rolling Stone journalist Cott (Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews, 2006, etc.) and John Lennon and Yoko Ono.
This is the story of Cott’s long association with Lennon and Ono, starting in 1968, told mostly through fully rambling interviews. The pleasure is in hearing their voices, for it seems that the material is verbatim from recordings. It starts during that fraught period when the Beatles were breaking up but still producing game-changing music, and Lennon and Ono were coming in for much more than their share of grief: for their naïve and ludic ways, the experimental nature of their music, the dissolution of the band and the passing of a brilliant cultural moment. Cott engages with Ono’s art, which could be challenging, and embraces its spirit of mindfulness and mirth while exploring how she managed to turn the vitriol spewed her way into a positive energy. But it is Lennon who commands the stage here, holding forth on the music he and Ono were making, bridling at the disservice of the press, explaining the bed-ins, the nude album cover, the deportation battles, the struggles with writing songs (“I always think there’s nothing there, it’s shit, it’s not good, it’s not coming out, it’s garbage…”) and the troubles of fame (“Do they want me and Yoko to kill ourselves onstage? What would make the little turds happy?”). Cott keeps the proceedings fluid and conversational, sometimes with a bit too much detail—“John got up and went over to a closet, took out a blue denim jacket, put it on, and then the three of us walked to the front door”—and sometimes a bit sycophantish (“an undeservedly blessed fan like myself”). Overall, though, he provides rare, raw and insightful comments from two colorful art personalities.
Lennon and Ono as open and naked as on the cover of Two Virgins.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-385-53637-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Nov. 13, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2012
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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