Another straightforward, solid hard rock bio from Wall.
A raucous biography of the legendary heavy metal band infamous for their offstage behavior.
Now recognized as one of the most influential and notorious rock bands in history, it was never easy for the four principal members of Black Sabbath. Growing up within a short distance of each other in the bleak Birmingham suburb Aston, the band formed in unlikely, albeit coincidental circumstances when former boyhood adversaries Ozzy Osbourne and Tony Iommi reconnected and brought together friends and fellow musicians Geezer Butler and Bill Ward to round out the core lineup of the group. The band toiled endlessly through name and lineup changes, honing their dark and sludgy sound in clubs (often getting tossed out after a few songs), and they built a devoted following on the back of their frenetic live shows. Suddenly, as quickly as it was improbable, Black Sabbath had landed a record deal and was being courted by established impresario/gangster Don Arden. The band refused Arden's advances, at first, but their fate was sealed when Osbourne was introduced to his daughter, Sharon, whom he would marry. Arden would later help the band recover from being ripped off by their managers. Veteran music journalist and biographer Wall (AC/DC: Hell Ain’t a Bad Place to Be, 2013, etc.) writes with conversational verve and wit, matching the lifestyles of his subjects, as he chronicles their unexpected rise to international fame and catastrophic downfall. The archetypal hallmarks of Black Sabbath’s career were epitomized after their sophomore album, “Paranoid,” went to No. 1 in the U.K.: “The next three years flew by in a blizzard of dope, cocaine, booze, sex, and the best music anybody in Black Sabbath would ever make.” Osbourne was ultimately expelled, and Sabbath reimagined itself with Ronnie James Dio as their new frontman and a host of other stand-ins before the original lineup reunited 35 years later.
Another straightforward, solid hard rock bio from Wall.Pub Date: April 14, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-05134-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2015
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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