Highly recommended for ex-hippies and collectors of celebrity sexual nuggets.
Sassy true confessions of a groupie who lived her life to the hilt in Los Angeles during the ’60s music scene and lived to tell the tale.
For better or worse, first-time author Parmer’s antics haven’t yet become the stuff of legend, like those of Pamela Des Barres–whose free-wheelin’ I’m With the Band set the bar for explicit rock-chick autobiographies–or defined a career track, as with self-professed “recovering groupie”/artist Cynthia Plaster Caster. But the author’s well on her way to joining that exhalted, exclusive club. In 1964, she’s a pretty, talented, smart and popular suburban Southern California teen. But all is not as it seems on the domestic front–her abusive, alcoholic mother is determined to thwart the girl’s every attempt to get ahead and away. But when the Beatles hit America, Parmer sees a way out. Soon enough she lets her hair down (literally), gets a guitar, hip clothes, new friends and is making the scene on the Strip and in Laurel Canyon. Eventually she loses her virginity to one of the Rolling Stones, hangs with the Turtles, Love, the Byrds, the Doors and a roster of other now-forgotten musicians, suffers medical emergencies and endures friends’ betrayals and the total estrangement of her chaotic family. Through it all she revels in her personal and sexual freedom, to a degree almost unthinkable to previous generations. Parmer is at her best when her naturally self-deprecating tone holds sway–there’s little of the braggadocio so often found in tell-alls. Rather than simply presenting a laundry list of her conquests and recounting in gruesome detail their individual kinks and quirks, the author tells her story without glamorizing or romanticizing it. And without a drop of remorse, self-pity or false humility. “There will never again be a decade so remarkably transitional, terrifying and beautiful as the sixties,” she says, and it rings true.
Highly recommended for ex-hippies and collectors of celebrity sexual nuggets.Pub Date: April 8, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4392-2982-8
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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