by Randall Sullivan ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 13, 2012
Few of the supporting players come off smelling like roses, but Sullivan’s sensitive portrait of his main subject is a good...
When former Rolling Stone senior editor Sullivan (The Miracle Detective: An Investigation of Holy Visions, 2004, etc.) was commissioned to write about the circumstances surrounding Michael Jackson’s shocking death in 2009, the author quickly grasped that only a book would do the bizarre story justice.
Rather than write a standard rags-to-riches celebrity bio, which the Jackson family’s humble origins might actually have warranted, Sullivan begins in the months after Jackson’s 2003 trial for sexual abuse of a child. This, it turns out, is as good a starting point as any to look back on Jackson’s “strange life” (as the subtitle puts it), his career, his legal travails, his marriages and fatherhood, and more importantly, his fascinatingly enigmatic character. As he details Jackson’s late-life sojourns with his three children to Dubai, Ireland, Las Vegas and Los Angeles, Sullivan also flashes back, in a couple of perfectly paced sections, to the child-molestation allegations in 1993 and 2003. He reveals a man who was not the pedophilic, transgendered, transracial freak the media thought he was, but a highly intelligent and sensitive perfectionist, more self-aware—and ashamed—of his surgically altered looks than the public ever knew. Sullivan’s choices do less justice to Jackson’s rise, his early life, and the development of his musical and dancing genius. While he admirably explicates the criminal case against the doctor who administered the potent pharmaceutical mix that killed Jackson, the author wastes too much time and detail on the soap-operatic legal battles of Jackson’s avaricious survivors and hangers-on.
Few of the supporting players come off smelling like roses, but Sullivan’s sensitive portrait of his main subject is a good start toward explaining and rehabilitating a lonely genius who was poorly understood in his lifetime.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0802119629
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Nov. 29, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2013
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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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