Tart, self-assured, and lasting.
It can’t be said that her relationship with Bob Marley was easy, but his wife of 15 years portrays it as intensely close and spiritual.
Rita Marley grew up in the rough Trench Town slums of Kingston, Jamaica. She was born to sing, and it wasn’t long before she conspired to bump into the Wailing Wailers as they walked to the recording studio down the road from her house. She formed the Soulettes to serve as the Wailers’ backup singers, and she formed a bond with Bob Marley close enough to lead to marriage. She joined Bob in the Rastafarian movement, which has some very specific prescriptions and proscriptions—although evidently, having numerous sexual relations outside marriage was not one of them, as Bob rarely spent the night with Rita. When she decided in 1971, after years of desperate poverty, that “the music thing was definitely not working” and she would have to go work in the US, leaving her children prompted sharp sadness. Meanwhile, Bob was busy back home getting two girlfriends pregnant. After Island Records took a chance on the “bad boys” against industry advice, they shot to fame, Bob played around even more, and the Marleys became as brother and sister. Rita’s role was to serve as protector: “I’d become more like a guardian. . . . I had more responsibility than just that of a wife,” she writes, admitting that the situation often pained her (“The boys born while I was in Delaware were not the last born outside our marriage, and I ended up taking care of many of them”). Marley doesn’t mince her words as she describes Trench Town, the trials of being penniless followed by the trials of being wealthy, and Bob’s probably preventable death.
Tart, self-assured, and lasting.Pub Date: April 7, 2004
ISBN: 0-7868-6867-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2004
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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