An intermittently compelling memoir of music-biz perseverance that eventually lapses into worthless celebrity worship.
Easy-listening icon Bolton recounts his hard-won rise to fame and the spoils of success.
The author may seem to many like just another assembly-line creation engineered in a Los Angeles hair salon for crass overnight success. Say what you will about his critically reviled repertoire of Motown covers and schmaltzy original love ballads, Bolton took a long, hard road to success. His long career in the music business officially began on the streets of New Haven, Conn., when he was barely a teenager. In the late 1960s and early ’70s, he was a scruffy nomad hippie, plying his white blues–rock in various generic bands and on street corners and dives in places like New Haven and Greenwich Village. With no formal education to fall back on, Bolton had no other choice but to press on in the face of one failed record deal after another. But in the late ’80s, Bolton found some success singing jingles and writing pop songs for other artists. As it turns out, he overestimated what it took to make it big in the music business. One day, at the behest of his boss at CBS, Bolton recorded a cover of “Dock of the Bay.” Suddenly, he became a multi-platinum–selling pop star and worldwide soccer-mom heartthrob. Unfortunately, once Bolton writes about the successful part of his career, after recounting 18 or so years of interesting futility, there’s not much drama left. The latter half of the book finds Bolton simply reeling off the predictable cavalcade of celebrities he counts among his friends. Even the most rabid Bolton fan probably isn’t aching to know what it's like to play golf with Clint Eastwood or about the talents of Bolton's charity softball team.
An intermittently compelling memoir of music-biz perseverance that eventually lapses into worthless celebrity worship.Pub Date: Jan. 29, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4555-2365-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Center Street/Hachette
Review Posted Online: Jan. 30, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2013
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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