A lightweight but enjoyable memoir from a humble man who has enjoyed a career he can be proud of.
A breezy, anecdotal memoir by the funky saxophonist who reveals himself to be an uncommonly decent man.
Though fans of James Brown and Parliament-Funkadelic know Parker as one of the finest saxophonists in the genre, even he admits that his first name is his claim to fame, particularly after his first recorded solo on “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag,” when Brown exhorted him, “I want you to blow, Maceo.” That huge hit elevated Parker beyond the ranks of talented but little-known sidemen, spreading the word even among international audiences who thought that “Maceo” was some kind of exotic slang rather than an actual man’s name. Though the book’s repetitiveness could have used a strong editor and another writer might have mined the material for more dramatic detail and narrative momentum, the author’s conversational tone makes for genial companionship. He relates his upbringing in a musical, churchgoing family, the financial struggles of his alcoholic (but much beloved) father, the adventures of a Southern black musician during segregation and the civil rights movement, and his attempts to avoid the draft during the Vietnam War. He tells how his drummer brother first commanded the attention of Brown, who agreed to hire Maceo as well to fill a need for a baritone saxophonist (which he had never played). The contrast between the strict discipline in Brown’s band and the comparative anarchy under P-Funk’s George Clinton (with whom many Brown alums decamped), as well as that between the early, whipcracking Brown and the later, drug-addled one generate much of the interest in the book. Yet even more compelling is the author’s self-portrait, as one who has “stayed away from drinking and drugs my entire life” and who was “most comfortable traveling in the slow lane when it came to women” (and lost some because of it).
A lightweight but enjoyable memoir from a humble man who has enjoyed a career he can be proud of.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-61374-346-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2012
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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