This particular song of the South merely scratches the surface of a legend.
A veteran novelist and nonfiction writer offers a Southerner’s take on country music’s poet laureate.
Hemphill, author of The Nashville Sound, an early look at the country music industry, and a number of other works with a Southern perspective, arrives decidedly late at the Hank Williams biography party. It’s difficult to imagine anyone improving on Colin Escott’s award-winning, meticulously researched 1994 work on Williams, revised last year; the Canadian writer, who won a Grammy as co-producer of a set of Williams’s complete recordings, added to the literature with Hank Williams: Snapshots From the Lost Highway (with Kira Florita, 2001) and his work on the 2004 PBS documentary about the country singer. Hemphill acknowledges Escott’s scholarship in his own unscholarly book, which offers the barest outline of Williams’s brief, tortured career. That outline is familiar to any Williams fan: his hardscrabble Alabama upbringing; the meteoric success of his simple, cuttingly affecting songs; his slug-it-out relationship with first wife, Audrey; his drug- and drink-plagued stardom; and his precipitous decline, including his sideshow-like marriage to second spouse, Billie; and his sudden death at 29 as 1953 dawned. There’s no deep new research here—the most talkative sources appear to be Williams’s steel guitarist Don Helms and Charles Carr, who chauffeured the musician on the night he died. Hemphill, a fellow Alabamian, takes the tack that Hank was a good ol’ boy just like Hemphill’s father, a long-distance trucker who liked to pound out Williams’s songs on the piano. The writer splashes plenty of local color on his canvas, especially in passages about Williams’s barnstorming early days. But he never reveals anything essential about his subject as an artist or as a suffering human being; worse, he never explains how or why so distinctly Southern a musician achieved such universality in his lifetime, on his own and in covers of his songs by such unlikely performers as Tony Bennett.
This particular song of the South merely scratches the surface of a legend.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2005
ISBN: 0-670-03414-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2005
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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