An intimate portrait of the multifaceted and beguiling Jones, who forever changed popular music and culture.
A lively biography of the enigmatic founder of the Rolling Stones, who was dethroned and died just as the band approached its artistic peak.
Raised in the conservative enclave of Cheltenham, Brian Jones’ (1942-1969) family life was the epitome of middle-class English repression and conformity. However, the bureaucratic culture of Cheltenham would mold Jones’ complex, roguish personality. Music journalist Trynka’s (David Bowie: Starman, 2011, etc.) portrait is that of a young man determined to get what he wanted, flaunting conventions and consequences and exhibiting little conscience as he cemented his ambition to become a professional musician. His obsession with American blues led him to London, where Jones immediately made a name for himself and soon met Mick Jagger and Keith Richards through the circle of musicians that hung around impresario Alexis Korner. It was Jones who corralled the members of the Rolling Stones, named the band after a Muddy Waters lyric, and influenced the band’s musical style by teaching Richards open G tuning, a blues staple that would define the Stones’ sound. There was no question that Jones was the Stones’ unrivaled leader. As they began charting success, they quickly became infamous for their infighting and drama, and the power struggles between Jones and the Jagger-Richards axis, often involving women, were well-documented. Eventually, Jones was dismissed, and several weeks later, he was found dead in his swimming pool, the exact details of his death still a controversy. Trynka expertly explores the paradoxes of Jones’ inner life, drawing on countless interviews of friends and fellow musicians, but there are times when the author comes across as righteously defensive of Jones, despite correcting many of the apparently erroneous claims made by Richards in his own autobiography. Occasionally, Trynka’s evidence creates a he said, she said situation that fails to definitively set the record straight. There is no disputing, however, that Jones was the mastermind of the Stones, and Trynka’s well-researched biography rightly reclaims his legacy.
An intimate portrait of the multifaceted and beguiling Jones, who forever changed popular music and culture.Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2014
ISBN: 978-0670014743
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 9, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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
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