“Above all, the Carters proved that simple songs about the lives of ordinary people can be as beautiful, as profound, and as...
An investigative biography of the Carters, the legendary bluegrass/country music family, from documentary filmmaker Zwonitzer.
With little original source material to work from, Zwonitzer did plenty of ferreting to discover the influences of the original Carter Family—A.P., Sara, and Maybelle—who 75 years ago put their voices onto wax cylinders and left them to be remastered forever. With their unforgettable harmonizing and scratch guitar work on such songs as “Wildwood Flower” and “Let the Circle Be Unbroken,” the Carters’ music influenced later singers from Woody Guthrie and Elvis to Joan Baez and Bob Dylan. But Zwonitzer also tracks musical influences on the Carters, from white southern gospel to Appalachian balladry, including descriptions of how A.P. scared up songs from the family’s poor hill country—from “remote hollows, tenant farms, mining camps, [and] big-city factories,” not to mention how they created wholly new material—songs of love, longing, hurt, loss, and suffering. Never soupy, always clear-eyed, the Carters offered a balm to the woes of the Great Depression with songs like “Keep On the Sunny Side.” Zwonitzer makes clear that they were no ham hillbilly act but just regular people, a family, though much of the story here is about the unraveling of that family and the reasons behind A.P. and Sara’s divorce and subsequent withdrawal from performing. Mother Maybelle kept at it, with her daughters, in the new Carter Family, and Zwonitzer charts their work here too, and their personal relations with artists like Hank Snow, Flatt and Scruggs, and Johnny Cash. He sheds light on the music industry’s financial skullduggeries, and there’s a greatly entertaining chapter on Texas radio station XERA, where the Carters were regulars, and on its owner “Doctor” Brinkley, purveyor of snake oil and sundry remedies.
“Above all, the Carters proved that simple songs about the lives of ordinary people can be as beautiful, as profound, and as lasting as music studied in conservatories.” Amen.Pub Date: July 10, 2002
ISBN: 0-684-85763-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
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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