Plenty of factoids and musical insight about our Piano Man, but at the end of this catty biography, Billy Joel is still The...
The book that millions of fans have pined for…sort of.
Many of singer-songwriter Joel’s most enduring tunes—“Scenes from an Italian Restaurant,” “Only the Good Die Young” and “New York State of Mind,” to name only a few—feel quite autobiographical, and it could be argued that his musical and cultural resonance stems in part from the fact that he’s led a representative American life. Raised in the ’hood by immigrant parents, he fought tooth and nail to achieve professional success, found (then lost) a trophy wife, lost (then found) his happiness and mental health. Since he hasn’t seen fit to write a memoir, this full-blown Joel-ography will fill a gap. The prolific Bego, author of books about Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson and Cher, among others, wears his love for Joel’s music on his sleeve, and his in-depth analysis of virtually every song in the musician’s canon is enthusiastic, if a bit repetitive. Unfortunately, the story is told primarily via secondhand source material and gossipy interviews with past and present bandmates; drummer Liberty DeVitto is especially bitter about some of Joel’s less-than-professional business dealings. Another negative is Bego’s jokey prose, which falls particularly short of the mark in a snotty, dismissive line about the musician’s 1970 suicide attempt. In a season of doorstop-sized rock bios (Nirvana, Joe Strummer, Iggy Pop), this falls somewhere in the middle in terms of quality: It’s readable and well-researched, but lacks depth and new information. A ten-year-old Behind the Music profile, which had the advantage of a lengthy interview with Joel himself, told fans more about what makes the man tick in one hour than they will learn here in 400-plus pages.
Plenty of factoids and musical insight about our Piano Man, but at the end of this catty biography, Billy Joel is still The Stranger.Pub Date: June 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-56025-989-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2007
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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