Indispensable for understanding the culture of the ’60s and the music that was at its heart.
A memoir by one of the founders of rock criticism, on the era that gave him his vocation and ultimately broke his heart.
Goldstein (Homocons: The Rise of the Gay Right, 2003, etc.) whose work in the Village Voice of the 1960s showed that it was possible to write serious criticism of the music of his generation, grew up in the Bronx as a nerdy kid who would sneak out of his neighborhood with a pair of sandals hidden in a bag so the neighborhood toughs wouldn’t beat him up. But his true passion was early rock ’n’ roll, doo-wop and the girl groups. He also became aware of the civil rights movement and took part in the 1963 March on Washington. Acquaintance with the likes of Lou Reed and Andy Warhol, combined with a Columbia journalism degree, led to a job writing about music and pop culture for the Voice. The cachet of the Voice got him into the hotel rooms of every major rock star of the era. While many treated him as just another newspaperman, he made friends with others, including Janis Joplin. Goldstein was also keeping his hand in the radical political scene, ultimately making a trip to the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention. That marked the beginning of his disillusion with the ideals of his generation, as the radical resistance to the nomination of Hubert Humphrey culminated in the election of Richard Nixon. A series of deaths in the rock world—most devastating to Goldstein, that of Joplin—depressed him further. He felt the machinery of hype had taken the music away from those who loved it. Writer’s block set in, along with a crisis of identity that led him to recast himself as a gay rights advocate. Goldstein gives a deeply felt and largely compelling portrait of an age that indelibly marked everyone who took part in it.
Indispensable for understanding the culture of the ’60s and the music that was at its heart.Pub Date: April 14, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-62040-887-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2014
PERSPECTIVES
PROFILES
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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