by Paul Trynka ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 9, 2014
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
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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996
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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