Well-stocked with interviews and evidence—a respectful, understanding portrait of a talented and unique soul who never...
The lost life of a groundbreaking musician and artist, murdered on the (possible) cusp of fame.
When researching his history of the iconic underground rock band Pixies (Fool the World, 2006), Frank came across a haunting song they often covered in concert called “In Heaven, Everything is Fine,” which he remembered vaguely from Eraserhead. He then found out it had been written for David Lynch by some guy named Peter Ivers. The book that Frank creates with freelance writer Buckholtz out of that serendipitous moment pays tribute to a gifted but unknown 20th-century American artist. A precociously talented child of Brookline, Mass., Ivers decamped for Harvard in the mid-’60s. The college was a font of theatrical and comedic energy, a staging ground for a bunch of high-voltage artistic personalities ranging from Stockard Channing to the entire National Lampoon crowd, which would utterly change American comedy in a few short years. A master blues harmonica player who often jammed with Muddy Waters, Ivers used his phenomenal musical talent, quick wit and bright-eyed enthusiasm to make himself indispensable in this fast-track crowd. But fame eluded him. A few albums went nowhere, and a disastrous opening performance for Fleetwood Mac put an end to his dreams of rock stardom. Relocated to Los Angeles, the gregarious Ivers again became a nodal point, this time in the city’s raw punk scene. As the host of a surreal, cult cable-access show, New Wave Theatre, he brought together Lampoon star Doug Kenney with punk agitators Fear and Dead Kennedys, while Hollywood friends Harold Ramis, John Belushi and Lynch came by to groove on the vibe. In 1983, on the verge of achieving some industry recognition, Ivers was found bludgeoned to death in his loft; the killer was never apprehended.
Well-stocked with interviews and evidence—a respectful, understanding portrait of a talented and unique soul who never managed to find a solid perch in the world.Pub Date: Aug. 12, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4165-5120-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
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