Emerson gives readers a marvelous social and historical context in which to consider 19th-century America's most popular songwriter. Race is the primary issue of Doo-Dah!, and Emerson (a former editor of the New York Times Magazine) does not shy away from stating plainly that as a young man Foster was a proslavery racist who wrote minstrel songs in a grotesque approximation of black English. However, Emerson points out, Foster ``was among the first white boys to do what white boys . . . have been doing ever since- -mimicking black music, or what they think is black music and black style.'' As a result of living in Pittsburgh—a main hub on the Underground Railroad—and being exposed to the ideas of people like militant abolitionist and first black US Army major Martin Delany and Harriet Beecher Stowe, Foster became able to consider blacks as human beings and not simply the butt of jokes. Emerson admits, ``There's no evidence that . . . Foster actually encountered Delany,'' but there is no question that the abolitionist's presence was felt all over the nation, and his presence in this book serves as a strong historical marker. Similarly, repeated references to the British Romantic poets and to Victorian novelists, like minstrelsy fan Charles Dickens, serve as the cultural backdrop for Foster's synthesis of European and African-American styles. Foster became a begrudging Unionist during the Civil War, though his problems with alcohol often caused him to lapse into his old racist ways, and he died at age 37, in New York City, a literal Bowery bum. This is perhaps the only way in which Foster's career matches that of Elvis Presley or Kurt Cobain, who are among the 20th- century musicians to whom Emerson compares Foster. But this is the only serious fault in an otherwise fine work of cultural history. (8 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: May 7, 1997
ISBN: 0-684-81010-7
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1997
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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