Solid overall, as we have come to expect from Wall, though some readers might prefer Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugarmen’s...
In which the Lizard King is revealed to have been human after all.
The dead–Jim Morrison industry has fallen off somewhat in recent years, but there’s still lively interest in the Doors on the part of music fans around the world—and readers, too. British rock writer/biographer Wall (Black Sabbath: Symptom of the Universe, 2015, etc.) does a good service by removing the spotlight from Morrison and putting it on the other three members of the legendary 1960s rock group. For instance, he writes, the little-heard-from drummer John Densmore, had problems with the front guy, “becoming ever more frustrated at the increasingly over-indulgent antics of the only guy in the band who couldn’t actually play an instrument.” The author credits guitarist Robbie Krieger with being the chief driving force behind the creation of the band’s catchiest tunes, giving Krieger and keyboardist Ray Manzarek full props for sonic ability and hipness made all the more hip by their lack of Morrison’s showy self-destruction. The usual figures, including the mystical Indian of Morrison myth, bow in, but Wall gives greater attention to the players who shaped the Doors’ legacy—the engineers and producers and background figures who never get enough attention. Though the author too often writes like someone’s superannuated uncle who never quite got over Woodstock (“Ray, who made the whole thing up, man. Kept the train on the tracks”), he tells a good story, and his attention to both the musical and business parts of the equation is a welcome addition to the usual fawning over Morrison’s Adonis-like qualities. Furthermore, the author has talked to the right people, at least those of them left alive, from producer and guiding light Jac Holzman to scene-maker Pamela Des Barres, who only faintly protests that Jim wasn’t anything but straight.
Solid overall, as we have come to expect from Wall, though some readers might prefer Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugarmen’s canonical No One Here Gets Out Alive (1980) for sheer rock-’n’-roll esprit.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-61373-408-7
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: June 27, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
