A poignantly intimate, revelatory read for Prince fans and music lovers.
A legendary musician and the co-author he chose three months before his death sketch a tantalizing half-finished self-portrait in both words and images.
When Prince died in 2016, he left behind 30 pages of a memoir that his co-writer, Paris Review advisory editor Piepenbring (co-author: Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties, 2019), had annotated with the singer’s own expansions and that Prince had intended as a “handbook for the brilliant community: wrapped in autobiography, wrapped in biography.” Remaining scrupulously faithful to that vision, Piepenbring pieces together Prince’s memoir fragments with never-before-seen memorabilia the editor helped excavate from the singer’s Paisley Park vault in Chanhassen, Minnesota. The book opens with Piepenbring’s warm remembrances of their brief association and statement of mission. Though unfinished, the memoir, which is divided into four parts, was to have set forth what Prince called an “an unconventional and poetic journey” that celebrated the creative freedom he prized above all else. Prince remembers the glamorous parents who raised him and whose interpersonal conflicts later fueled much of his creative output. He also reminisces about his hometown, Minneapolis, his worship of his musician father, and his first loves, music being chief among them. The second section, “For You,” consists of photographed images—at once funny and supremely personal—of a scrapbook Prince kept in the years preceding his first album, For You (1978). In “Controversy,” Piepenbring traces the creative work that followed For You and preceded Purple Rain (1984) with images of both the singer and lyrics—complete with Prince’s doodles and corrections—to such classics such as “1999.” The final section, “Baby I’m a Star,” features both handwritten treatments for Prince’s semiautobiographical film, Purple Rain, and Piepenbring’s typewritten version. Laced throughout with quotations from Prince interviews, this visually stunning labor of love reveals the shy, vulnerable man behind the glitz and controversy without ever “punctur[ing] the veil of mystery around him.”
A poignantly intimate, revelatory read for Prince fans and music lovers.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-399-58965-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Oct. 29, 2019
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
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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