The author’s approach allows him to tell more of the story, and even without presenting Marley’s voice directly, this is an...
An oral history that presents a well-rounded portrait of the music legend, allowing for multiple, sometimes-conflicting, points of view.
Robert Nesta Marley (1945-1981) left a legacy of beautiful music, helping to push reggae from its Jamaican roots out into the world at large. Mindful of the many books about Marley already available, reggae historian Steffens (The Family Acid, 2015, etc.) worked to make a complete narrative covering the musician’s entire life and filling in the cracks left by previous books. The author goes into great detail about Marley’s early recordings, the inner workings of the Wailers, and the cancer that eventually took Marley’s life. Steffens has interviewed dozens of major and minor players in Marley’s life, including Wailers Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer, Island Records’ Chris Blackwell, Marley’s mother, Cedella Booker, and various friends, musicians, and associates. There is a fullness to the collective weight of all these observations that is well-suited to the oral history format. What emerges is a not a clear picture of Marley the man but rather a true sense of how complicated his life was. His legend and impact, his work ethic, his abilities as a musician and leader—these are beyond question—but there are a lot of contrasting voices. On the question of who wrote “I Shot the Sheriff,” for example, Marley’s then-girlfriend Esther Anderson and his friend Lee Jaffe both think the story starts with them. There are disagreements over how people met, who paid royalty payments, who deserves credit for music and lyrics, etc. Steffens inserts himself as a voice like any of the others, offering structure and sometimes serving as a referee. If someone has told what has proven to be a lie, the author steps in and clarifies. But mostly, he lets his subjects speak for themselves.
The author’s approach allows him to tell more of the story, and even without presenting Marley’s voice directly, this is an illuminating portrait of an extraordinary life.Pub Date: July 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-393-05845-1
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 7, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2017
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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