A patchy work of pop history that tells more than it shows.
A chaotic cultural chronicle of a great city during a pivotal year.
A lot was happening in Boston in 1968. Looking back, writes musician and music critic Walsh, “is like catching a glimpse of an upside down, hallucinogenic version of the thriving metropolis that stands today.” In his first book, the author attempts to bring it all back home, to connect a tangle of loose wires and see what one thing might have had to do with the other. Over here, we have Irish transplant Van Morrison, set to make his greatest album: a one-of-a-kind, stream-of-consciousness song cycle steeped in death and rebirth and “completely preoccupied with notions and transcendence and the sublime.” Over there, we have Mel Lyman, the writer and musician who established a worshipful cult following known as the Fort Hill Community. At the same time, MGM Records was trying to invent a genre called the Boston Sound, which garnered more press than listeners. There was also a cut-up collage program on local TV, What’s Happening, Mr. Silver? that was capturing everyone’s attention. The documentarian Frederick Wiseman was upsetting officials with Titicut Follies, the movie The Boston Strangler was trying an unresolved case on screen, and a pre–Ram Dass Richard Alpert was turning on and tuning in with Timothy Leary. Walsh delivers plenty of information and offers some insightful stories about this time—particularly about the making of Morrison’s masterpiece—and occasionally draws some interesting associations: the mystical influences, for example, that inspired the Velvet Underground, their acolyte Jonathan Richman, and Morrison himself. Unfortunately, the narrative parts fail to fully cohere. Unlike Will Hermes’ Love Goes to Buildings on Fire (2011), which fully captured the changing cultural landscape of a thriving city (New York), no clear image ever quite emerges and nothing solid develops from all these coincidences.
A patchy work of pop history that tells more than it shows.Pub Date: March 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-7352-2134-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2018
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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