An honest personal portrait but also one where the author could have revealed more—and written less.
Amiable and informative, if not always compelling, memoir by the folkie who anchored Jefferson Airplane.
As guitarist for Airplane, Kaukonen once wrote a memorable acoustic instrumental named “Embryonic Journey.” That could well serve as a title for this debut, the septuagenarian rocker’s therapeutic account of his inner and outer life and times. The son of a State Department attaché, Kaukonen’s formative years were spent traveling around the world. Along the way, he became an obsessive finger-picking guitarist and, luckily, wound up back on the family’s California home turf at a time when legendary bands were formed at a moment’s notice. Such was the case with the Airplane, which reaped a hefty advance from the beginning and created a new and defiantly trippy sound. “All of a sudden,” he writes, “psychedelic was no longer a door to perception or an excuse to party…it was becoming a genre!” As the money rolled in, so did amphetamines (among many other pharmaceuticals) and more music. “I am convinced that many of the crystalline solos on those Airplane recordings were directly related to that little orange pill,” writes the author. “It’s funny to think that my life could have been so completely ruled by mood-altering substances, but at the time it would never have occurred to me that there might be another way to live.” Kaukonen spares little in describing the winding path of his life, both the ups (writing and playing music) and the downs (addiction and a destructive codependent marriage). Unfortunately, his philosophical and spiritual ramblings become increasingly repetitive and tedious. Also, while he offers factual details about life inside the Airplane (and follow-up band Hot Tuna), he is short on offering the kind of interesting personal details only he would know—e.g, what was/is lead singer Grace Slick really like? Was he affected by the controversies swirling around the provocative “Volunteers” album?
An honest personal portrait but also one where the author could have revealed more—and written less.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-12548-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
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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