Interesting drugged-out memories from the original manager of the infamous hippie rock group. Scully was introduced to the Dead by LSD guru Owsley Stanley and became the band's manager-by-default, helping to shape this group of ``crazy-looking guys, high on acid, who had come together higgledy-piggledy'' into the ultimate San Francisco trips band. He is at his best describing, with Dalton (coauthor of Faithfull, not reviewed), the early days of the Dead, when they lived communally in the famous Victorian house at 710 Ashbury Street. With considerable good humor and irony, he recreates the hippie dream of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll, along the way describing a memorable cast of characters. An obvious devotee of Jerry Garcia (who emerges as the hero of the group and the book), Scully is harder on the other band members, including Bob Weir, whom he describes as a pitifully inept rhythm guitarist who longs for mainstream pop success; Mickey Hart, a talented drummer, but an opportunist; the eternally drunk and musically limited Pigpen (who is the band's first casualty); musically pretentious Phil Lesh; and stingy Bill Kreutzmann. The book offers valuable insight into the making of the Dead's albums, showing why they have always been better live than in the studio. Memories of the '70s and '80s are less fully realized, as the authors resort to reproducing unedited tour diaries. Scully portrays Garcia's (and his own) early '80s descent into heroin addiction with painful honesty, showing how the rest of the band labored to keep the act alive, even at the price of Garcia's health. The book ends with a brief epilogue written after the news of Garcia's death. An American epic, if not exactly an American Beauty. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Jan. 2, 1996
ISBN: 0-316-77712-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1995
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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