A well-written and brutally honest remembrance of the glory days of rave culture.
Life after Joy Division: an insider offers a comprehensive history of New Order.
Now entering a new phase as the elder statesman of electronic dance music and the “Madchester” music scene, Hook (Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division, 2013, etc.) provides an extremely thorough history of his legendary follow-up group, New Order. As raw, undiluted, and fitfully funny as its predecessors, this spiritual sequel starts by asking a difficult question: “Do we need to go into the circumstances of Ian’s death?” The answer, as it turns out, is no and yes. No, because it’s been covered, and yes, because Hook never fully recovered from the death of Joy Division’s doomed frontman Curtis, not to mention the consequential years of drug and alcohol abuse. The stories are entertaining, though, opening with producer John Robie assaulting “Hooky” in front of Molly Ringwald at the premiere of Pretty in Pink in 1985. In the following pages, Hook describes the making of hits like “Blue Monday,” “Bizarre Love Triangle,” and others as well as his dynamic and difficult relationships with his band mates, particularly vocalist Bernard Sumner. Even triumphs like headlining the Reading Festival are dismissed with casual abandon: “International rock star = bollocks.” Along the way, Hook offers anecdotes, timelines detailing recording sessions and performances, “geek alerts” commenting on instruments and recording gear, and sly asides—e.g., “Ten Most Interesting Medical Problems I Got Working in a Band.” The author also offers a visceral depiction of the druggy music scene with stories about bands like Happy Mondays and the Stone Roses, who “deserve a chapter to themselves, so here we go.” It’s an unapologetic rock memoir, concerned less with legacy and more with what really went down: “the idea being to bring you the most complete and truthful record of life inside New Order as is humanly possible.” By that standard, the book is a marvelous success.
A well-written and brutally honest remembrance of the glory days of rave culture.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-230797-2
Page Count: 768
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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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