The genius behind the Kinks escorts a fictional interlocutor through the first three decades of his life, with much of the perversity, charm, and uneasy wit of his most ambitious lyrics. A couple of decades in the future, the all-powerful Corporation sends a disturbed young employee out to assemble the details of Ray Davies's illustrious career. The Davies this narrator meets is a seedy, manipulative, not necessarily reliable old recluse whose motives for unburdening himself to a stranger are possibly sinister. Davies, the character, announces that he might not be telling the truth; Davies, the author, is erecting a whole lot of complications around a fairly standard memoir of the irrational process of becoming and remaining a pop star. He describes efficiently the familiar clichÇs of British-Invasion- rocker background: rebellious postwar childhood, art college, rapture over American blues records, rapid escalation to fame in the wake of the Beatles' success. What kept the Kinks from slinking back into obscurity was Davies's ability to write songs like ``Sunny Afternoon'' and ``Waterloo Sunset,'' which are so evocative partly because their first-person narrators, as in this book, at once represent Davies and a fictional persona. Happily, Davies knows which of his songs are of lasting merit, and he discusses their genesis insightfully. Because of bad recording and publishing deals signed in 1964, at the start of the Kinks' career, he spent most of the rest of the '60s in legal wrangles that left him somewhat traumatized; Davies conveys the distressing slapstick of having a prolific, internationally successful band and little to show for it. He takes us only through 1973, which marked an emotional and aesthetic nadir, and then, in the fictional frame, describes his own death. Given the elaborate disavowals of sincerity, it's unclear whether Ray's really this dour or whether he's just breaking for a sequel. An overweening but entertaining mess.
Pub Date: Sept. 25, 1995
ISBN: 0-87951-611-9
Page Count: 420
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1995
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
SEEN & HEARD
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