Gordon makes a convincing case that if music can’t exactly save us, it can tell us who we are.
The acclaimed music chronicler tells the story of Memphis through its songs.
Gordon (Respect Yourself: Stax Records and the Soul Explosion, 2013, etc.) seeks to evoke the heart of the metropolis as reflected not only through its physical landscape, but also through its soul. The author’s latest is a collection of 20 profiles or portraits—subjects include, among others, Bobby Bland, Townes Van Zandt, Alex Chilton, and Jerry Lee Lewis—that together add up to a musical-textual collage. “I began to connect the art to the life,” he writes, referring to the Memphis blues player Furry Lewis, “to understand how Furry’s circumstances—his ramshackle dwelling and his history—were reflected in his songs.” The idea is to frame music as not just a way of life in other words, but also as life’s expression, which has been Gordon’s idea all along. Unlike his earlier books, this new work is something of a grab bag, bringing together liner notes and journalistic pieces, some never before in print. Given the subject, though, that approach seems oddly appropriate; music, after all, is complex and elusive, as are many of the people portrayed here. There’s Jim Dickinson, the legendary Memphis musician and producer who worked with Chilton and had performed on “Wild Horses.” “There’s a lot of people that can play better than me,” he declared. “But they can’t play with the Stones better than me.” Or Sam Phillips, who once carried on “a heated argument” with Jerry Lee Lewis at Sun studios: “Could the devil’s music save souls? Immediately after Sam withdrew from the room, Jerry Lee cut the master take of ‘Great Balls of Fire.’ ” Best of all is the author’s extended piece on the legal battle over Robert Johnson’s copyrights, a story originally written for LA Weekly, in which the art of business and the business of art become egregiously intertwined.
Gordon makes a convincing case that if music can’t exactly save us, it can tell us who we are.Pub Date: March 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63286-773-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Jan. 7, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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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