A rock bio for accountants. ``Experienced'' with Redding, former bassist with The Jimi Hendrix Experience, means trounced and raped by the rock biz, not musically experienced. For ten years, Redding kept a detailed business diary that included his years with the Hendrix band (1967- 70) and schedules of every place the group played. In the 70's, deep into a downslide, he began this book, brought it quite a way along, then set it aside when publication seemed hopeless—Rolling Stone turned down the first draft because it lacked ``fan-type'' material. His housemate worked on the manuscript with him but finally gave up when the pages got too depressing to type. Now that it's done, was it worth it? Well, Hendrix fans will be better off with Harry Shapiro and Caesar Glebbeek's definitive Jimi Hendrix: Electric Gypsy (p. 659) or the musicultural criticism of Charles Murray's Crosstown Traffic: Jimi Hendrix and the Post-War Rock 'n' Roll Revolution (1990). Redding's is a truly dreary tale, thickened with drugs and legal troubles beyond belief. Once battered by post- Hendrix contractual cross fire, Redding becomes a monumental injustice collector, a put-upon St. Anthony bleeding from hundreds of bitter arrows as the posthumous ``$200 million'' Hendrix empire passes him by. How much did Redding's terrific drug-taking keep him focused on endless failures in court? He never says, but friends were estranged by his obsessive legal chatter. Most of the recording sessions described grow into huge, unproductive parties and drug orgies. Redding's descriptions of his early years as a struggling musician are lively, but he has nothing new to add about Hendrix's death, and most of the incidents Hendrix had on the road are already familiar. Mass hysteria, a long depression, and today a few smiles. (Fifty b&w photos.)
Pub Date: Aug. 15, 1991
ISBN: 1-872180-36-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Fourth Estate/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1991
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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