Essential for any devotee of the Band, Dylan, or rock music in the last half of the 20th century.
Nothing forges the bonds of brotherhood like life in a band, especially when it’s the Band.
“When you awake, you will remember everything,” Robertson once wrote; true to form, this debut memoir—covering the life of Robertson and the Band up to the legendary “Last Waltz” concert in 1976—doesn’t miss a thing. Whether running interference for a gangster uncle, taking B12 shots with Edie Sedgwick, or hanging with Bob Dylan at Big Pink, Robertson recalls all the key moments of an eventful life with a songwriter’s eye for detail. Part Indian, part Jewish, and a Canadian native who would adopt and reinvent American music, Robertson learned his trade as a barely legal member of the Hawks, the backing band of rockabilly American transplant Ronnie Hawkins. After years of playing together, the Hawks left Hawkins and were soon touring with Dylan. It was a Faustian bargain—the group famously endured nightly boos as Dylan tortured the folkies with his electric guitars and amps—but the association also led to the most productive periods in the lives of everyone involved. Robertson is especially strong at capturing the Band’s life with Dylan, where a shared spontaneity would inform both Dylan’s legendary “Basement Tapes” and the Band’s classic first albums. “Songs poured out of Bob and we tore through them; if lightning struck and you weren’t around, the show went on without you,” writes the author. What distinguishes the book more than anything is that, besides being Robertson’s story, it’s also a memoriam for the Band, a deeply felt thanatopsis for a group of renegades who were never better than when they were together. The picture may be a bit too rosy; post-breakup, Robertson was permanently at odds with the late Levon Helm over publishing credits. The author addresses the issue but not the fallout.
Essential for any devotee of the Band, Dylan, or rock music in the last half of the 20th century.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-307-88978-2
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Crown Archetype
Review Posted Online: Aug. 24, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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
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