Still: Often wry, always witty—a fascinating glimpse of the Big Bang in folk music.
A member of an acclaimed Irish folk-singing group (The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem) creates a crisp, sprightly chronicle of his impoverished childhood and his rise to prominence during the hootenanny era of the late 1950s and early ’60s.
Clancy remembers a WWII childhood with days so cold that ice formed in the chamber pots and meals were so lean for the 10 children that he sometimes ate mortar from the chimney. Although Clancy was a shy boy (the nuns in school terrified him), and although his father wanted him to go into the insurance business (a brief tenure in the profession cured Clancy of that notion), the young man fell in love with poetry and drama and the cinema. He eventually earned a small part in a play starring Cyril Cusak, who told Clancy to drop the name “William” and go by the more exotic “Liam.” Clancy’s life changed when some collectors of folk songs arrived in Ireland in 1955. He joined them, met his life-long friend Tommy Makem in the process, and began his love affair with Irish music that endures to this day. He eventually went to the US, where he met and socialized with the young (and old) lions of folk music: Josh White, Jean Ritchie, Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, the Kingston Trio, and many others. He had an uncomfortable relationship with Diane Hamilton (a Guggenheim), who supported him financially but offered a romance he could not reciprocate. After some experiences acting, Clancy, two of his brothers and friend Tommy Makem began singing traditional Irish songs and caught lightning in a bottle. The memoir ends in 1961 as Dame Fame arrives for a lengthy sojourn: “We’re fuckin’ famous!” cries brother Tom after an appearance with Ed Sullivan. But Clancy does not always struggle sufficiently against the obvious (“Life is never the same after such an experience,” he writes about the death of his father).
Still: Often wry, always witty—a fascinating glimpse of the Big Bang in folk music.Pub Date: Feb. 19, 2002
ISBN: 0-385-50204-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2001
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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