A searing autobiography by one of rock 'n' roll's most tragic and romantic figures. A descendant of Austrian novelist Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, the beautiful Faithfull was discovered by Rolling Stones manager Andrew Oldham in 1964 and became an instant pop celebrity with her recording of the brooding ``As Tears Go By,'' a song Oldham asked Mick Jagger and Keith Richards to write for her. In a short time, Faithfull had become an internationally famous music and movie star, but she had little control over her image or artistic output. With the aid of rock biographer Dalton (Mr. Mojo Risin': Jim Morrison, the Last Holy Fool, 1991, etc.), she describes her struggle against the passive ``Angel Doll'' persona foisted on her by the press and her relationship to the Stones, especially Jagger, for whom she left husband John Dunbar in 1966. A dark romanticism- -what she calls a ``Walter Pater aestheticism,'' replete with flashes of everything from astrology to black magic—pervades the narrative, which is chock-full of encounters with pop legends (John Lennon is ``amusingly cruel''; Allen Ginsberg ``has never been hip''). Faithfull, who's had her own share of same-sex dalliances, suggests it was sexual tensions among the highly repressed Stones that gave them their manic energy: ``Who was the great love of [Jagger's] life? Actually, I think it was Keith.'' The tone is both compelling and pathetic as Faithfull details two decades of drug abuse and numerous lonely attempts to escape her addiction. From watching a lover commit suicide to recent singing and acting successes on her own terms, Faithfull has lived enough for three or four people—yet she is only 47. Despite some trite prose (``Things were happening so fast and we were changing with them''), this holds greater interest than any other recent book about the Stones and their circle. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Aug. 29, 1994
ISBN: 0-316-27324-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1994
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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