Relentlessly enjoyable, and enhanced by the author’s absolute refusal to keep even a shred of his dignity intact.
Alternative music’s most obsessed-about icon gets the business from an appropriately obsessed fan.
Barely two pages into this “psychobio” of the former lead signer of The Smiths, the author opines, “Arguably, poor Oscar [Wilde] was merely an early, failed, and somewhat overweight prototype for Morrissey,” and not many more before he declares, “ ‘The Smiths’ is the greatest of the Smiths’ albums, making it, of course, the Greatest Album of All Time.” There’s a wink and a nudge here, of course: Simpson, known in his native Britain as a wickedly funny, out-there gay satirist, is well aware of just how unhinged—or, yes, “alarming”—he is going to sound to those not initiated into the cult of Morrissey, and he plays off that to an extent. But he still truly thinks that Morrissey is just about the best thing to have hit modern music since . . . well, anyone. To many, The Smiths was just a band of mopey Brits with a classically handsome, sexually ambiguous singer crooning about heartache over jangling guitars. But to a vociferous minority, Morrissey became an icon, an “anti-pop idol” in Simpson’s words; to this day, his solo concerts are mobbed by screaming fans. The author is not so concerned with rehashing the ups and downs of a landmark alternative band as he is with dissecting Morrissey himself: what makes the bookish, vegetarian, celibate Irish-Catholic from Manchester tick, and what draws his fans to him. No matter how hard he digs into the perverse appeal of a highly sexualized star who renounces sex itself, Simpson doesn’t quite get an answer, but along the way he is able to fire off plenty of tart darts at the pop-historical landscape, continually topping one ludicrously overreaching announcement (“Morrissey was the real mad lad holding the world hostage at the point of a pop single”) with another.
Relentlessly enjoyable, and enhanced by the author’s absolute refusal to keep even a shred of his dignity intact.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-7690-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2005
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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