Must-read for those who love that era and want a fresh perspective on it.
A musician’s memoir of punk rock in its New York City heyday shows how much fun it was while it lasted, before AIDS and heroin had the last laugh.
As frontman for the Senders, Marcade never saw his band achieve the notoriety of the Ramones, Blondie, Talking Heads, or others that played CBGBs and Max’s Kansas City, but his memoir has an antic vitality and humor that seem to encapsulate the spirit of those times. Everything seemed so funny—even nodding out from heroin, throwing up from overindulgence, and getting tossed into jail, where the teenage Marcade begins this account after getting busted for dope. A French native, he had come to America for adventure. He found his share and also found himself in the middle of the punk scene that was soon to emerge on the Lower East Side. Everyone seemed to know him and like him—former New York Doll Johnny Thunders brought him from Boston to New York and provided entree. The Clash appreciated him so much that they invited the Senders to open for them at their peak. Marcade was the one who, by his account, told Nancy Spungen to follow her heart to London, where she began her fatal romance with the Sex Pistols’ Sid Vicious. (“You need love, not heroin,” he remembers telling her.) There are a number of hilarious, outrageous scenes involving pets—not just dogs and cats, but monkeys—or parties, and some featuring both, and there is plenty of insider observation: “The Ramones got along great with everybody, which was funny because they couldn’t stand each other.” And there are way too many exclamation points. Ultimately, AIDS cost many their lives and others their sexual freedom. Heroin also took many of Marcade’s friends, his marriage, and his band. Written 35 years after he kicked his addiction for good, the book retains the madcap spirit of that time and place, suggesting how punk happened and why it had to end.
Must-read for those who love that era and want a fresh perspective on it.Pub Date: May 2, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-941110-49-2
Page Count: 245
Publisher: Three Rooms Press
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
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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