The death of Rutherford’s father frames the narrative, establishing a reflective tone that the memoir sustains.
A genial, gentlemanly memoir about a band that has weathered plenty of upheaval without apparently suffering much strife.
Though it borrows its title from the biggest hit from Rutherford’s offshoot band, Mike and the Mechanics, the focus and justification for the book lies with its subtitle. Many readers would likely prefer a book by or about that band’s higher-profile frontmen—Peter Gabriel and Phil Collins—but founding guitarist Rutherford proves well-positioned to tell the tale, as one of only two members to remain throughout the band’s extended tenure. If you’re looking for sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll, this isn’t your book, and Genesis isn’t your band. Formed by schoolboy friends, later adding drummer Collins and guitarist Steve Hackett, Genesis had a unique musical evolution from seated musicians updating British folk to progressive conceptualists with a high-tech stage show. They were never a band of virtuosos, but they were more creatively ambitious than folky. They were also a band that valued the song rather than seeing it as a vehicle for instrumental showboating, and it was one in which most of them contributed to the material. During their popular ascent, it was thought at the time that they were dealt a devastating blow with the departure of Gabriel, yet Rutherford explains, “[t]here’s only so long you can carry on productively without shaking things up and now that he had gone we felt like a new band.” Collins took over vocals and then raised his own profile with a successful solo career (while remaining part of the band). “Our small cult audience had become a big cult audience,” writes the author, who doesn’t seem to have let any of it go to his head. Aside from the occasional marijuana mishap with the law, the author has seemingly lived a very stable life as a band mate and family man.
The death of Rutherford’s father frames the narrative, establishing a reflective tone that the memoir sustains.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-06068-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 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.
