A rare and revelatory look at a rock legend.
Highly personal photos, letters and commentary illuminate the extraordinary life and times of late Beatles guitarist and songwriter George Harrison (1943–2001).
In this highly revealing book, fans will see the world the way Harrison saw it—largely through his own camera lens. Here we have Harrison looking out on the bleak brick-and-mortar streets of postwar Liverpool, England, and readers, like him, have absolutely no indication that this is the start of something incredible. It’s just George, his mum and dad, his brothers and a couple of school chums who have come around to bang on guitars. Quickly, however, things change and Harrison is suddenly looking out on a throng of guys and gals gleefully packed into a tight underground club in Hamburg, Germany. Delightfully innocent letters home accompanying these shots brim with unrestrained awe and excitement about the whole thing. In no time at all, it seems, Harrison was hanging out with music icons, yogis, race-car drivers and movie directors. He packed a lot of living into his 58 years, taking on the role of rock star, spiritual seeker, movie mogul, racing enthusiast, philanthropist and even gardener—not to mention loving husband, father and friend. This collection from Harrison’s widow Olivia—a companion to the HBO documentary directed by Martin Scorsese—depicts each of these impressive incarnations with remarkable clarity. Accompanying commentary from friends including Eric Clapton, Ravi Shankar, Eric Idle and others help round out the intimate portrait. Harrison consistently strove for a higher plane of existence, but he was also something of a rascal (and Monty Python acolyte) who abhorred authority, pomposity and hypocrisy in all its forms. These insightful photographs succeed in reaching past the laconic expression Harrison seemed to favor at times, and exposing the glint in his eye.
A rare and revelatory look at a rock legend.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4197-0220-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2011
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.
