A welcome contribution to a growing body of serious but not solemn work about The Fabs before and after, the cute bassist in...
“The world’s most famous living Liverpudlian” speaks.
McCartney has never been shy of speaking his mind. Here, he opens up, repeatedly and over several decades, to longtime NME correspondent and founding Mojo editor Du Noyer (Deaf School: The Non-Stop Pop Art Punk Rock Party, 2013, etc.) on all manner of topics, not least of them “the world’s most famous dead Liverpudlian,” he being, of course, fellow Beatle John Lennon. Sir Paul’s not just a Beatle, though he will go to his grave with that designation first and foremost. To judge by Du Noyer’s portrait, he is the cheeky and cheerful fellow of popular depiction, though he is also deeply thoughtful and capable of self-criticism, if not always very trenchant. Since Lennon’s murder 36 years ago, McCartney has labored to rebuild his image as the lite-pop Beatle against Lennon’s rocker, and here his conversations sometimes turn to such things as his Little Richard shout and penchant for blistering rockers like “Helter Skelter.” There are surprises aplenty for Beatles casualists; who knew that Linda sang the highest of the high notes on “Let It Be”? Du Noyer’s book has a slightly slapped-together feel, as if raw material for a more cohesive biography in times to come, but for all that, it contains bits and pieces that are suggestive and illuminating. At one point, McCartney recounts, for instance, being stuck in writing the song that would become “Drive My Car,” which well illustrates his thesis that the whole business of songwriting involves “some kind of mystery as to whether you’re going to pull it off.” Happily, Du Noyer concentrates on the substantive in these conversations, which are both thematically and chronologically arranged, avoiding celebrity fluff to get into the meat—beg pardon, Sir Paul being a vocal vegetarian and all—of his work.
A welcome contribution to a growing body of serious but not solemn work about The Fabs before and after, the cute bassist in particular.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4683-1340-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
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.
