Timely and significant—a dark look through a dark glass onto the events of 30 years past.
A panoramic view of the events leading up to the infamous murder of John Lennon (1940–1980).
Lennon plainly said that one reason he relocated to New York City was that he could be, if not anonymous, at least left alone there. He didn’t bank on the dozens of die-hard Beatles fans—never Lennon-as-solo-artist fans—who camped out on his doorstep, a few of whom he even befriended while gently encouraging them to get a life. He had had premonitions for years, saying at the height of his Beatles fame, “We’ll either go in a plane [crash] or we’ll be popped off by some loony.” Unfortunately so, and as America’s Most Wanted producer Greenberg (co-author: Perfect Beauty: A Glamorous Socialite, Her Handsome Lover, and Brutal Murder, 2002, etc.) writes, each of the Beatles, and particularly George Harrison, lived in understandable fear of being killed by a deranged admirer. The author’s account is sometimes moment by moment, sometimes a sweeping view of decades, and it often jumps backward and forward in time, occasionally yielding reader whiplash. Yet, in the space of a relatively short book, he ably captures all the right themes, from the hazards of fame to the curious reception of Beatles lyrics among a certain class of fans, who regarded them as life instructions. Greenberg does not shy from remarking on some of Lennon’s less likable features, including his de facto abandonment of son Julian, but neither does he paint Lennon as a monster deserving of comeuppance, in the manner of the loathsome Albert Goldman. The author is also evenhanded in his portrayal of murderer Mark David Chapman, who, of course, has found Jesus in prison and is said to be lobbying for release. However, Greenberg attributes the celebrity-killing meme of the 1980s and beyond—to say nothing of the breakup of Wings—to Chapman’s example, noting also that Chapman liked the Beatles less than he liked Todd Rundgren.
Timely and significant—a dark look through a dark glass onto the events of 30 years past.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-87930-963-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Backbeat Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2010
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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