Where memoirs from bigger stars often fail to deliver, this illuminating autobiography exceeds expectations.
A surprisingly rich memoir from a two-time Grammy winner and acclaimed backup singer.
Amid a glut of rock memoirs, it seems that anyone who ever had a hit has written a book, and Coolidge wouldn’t seem to have the richest story to tell, as she is best known for a tepid 1970s remake of “Higher and Higher” and as the lower-profile spouse in her tempestuous marriage to Kris Kristofferson during that time. However, in a manner that rarely seems gossipy and never salacious, the author presents her perspective on the sea changes that rock underwent in the early 1970s, an era in which she played a key role in the careers and lives of Leon Russell, Joe Cocker, Eric Clapton, and Crosby, Stills and Nash. “If you look back at this period in my life, it might seem like I was sleeping with every guy in town,” writes Coolidge. “I wasn’t. Leon and I were together for close to a year, same with Graham.” She details the seismic shifts that took place as Russell joined forces with Delaney and Bonnie, then stole their band for the Mad Dogs and Englishmen tour that almost ruined Cocker, and Eric Clapton forsook the supergroup status of Cream and Blind Faith to fall under the Southern sway of Delaney Bramlett. The drummer through much of this period was Jim Gordon, whose demons would lead him to beat his girlfriend, Coolidge, unconscious and later murder his mother. The author also recounts how routinely Delaney battered Bonnie as well as Ike Turner’s mistreatment of Tina. She saw marijuana give way to cocaine and heroin as British rock stars in particular developed a sense of entitlement. “I wanted to say, What is wrong with you people? What did your mother teach you?” writes Coolidge, who comes across as not all that deep but uncommonly decent. The instant attraction with Kristofferson and volatile estrangement receives a full airing, as well.
Where memoirs from bigger stars often fail to deliver, this illuminating autobiography exceeds expectations.Pub Date: April 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-237204-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2016
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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