A finely crafted portrait of the southern rock group that created some of the 1970s' most appealing and inventive music. Georgia-based journalist Freeman shows great command of both history and southern context in explicating the richly diverse musical sources of the band's sound. He plays it straight and from the top, beginning with the fatherless, troubled Allman brothers in Tennessee and their youthful discovery of black music—Jackie Wilson gave Gregg goosebumps he thought ``were permanent''—then moving on to describe guitarist Duane's developing mastery, Gregg's bluesy voice, and the brothers' adoption of Macon, Ga., as the unlikely site of their musical stand. (As their fame grew, it became the mecca of southern rock.) The Allman Brothers Band changed personnel often, and Freeman tracks a big, biracial cast of hardscrabble, drug-scarfing outlaws who tangled with the Dixie Mafia and even murder when road manager Lydon Twiggs stabbed a club owner who refused to pay them. He focuses primarily on edge-dweller Duane, who soon became one of rock's legendary guitarists (``I took speed every night for three years and practiced'') but died in a motorcycle accident in 1971; enigmatic but feckless Gregg, unable to overcome drug addiction or deal responsibly with women; and mercurial Dickey Betts, the sweet-playing slide guitarist who grew into stardom after Duane's death. Freeman's determination to cover it all—including the dollar value of every contract and child- support judgment—encumbers his story. But for the most part he tells this yarn well, giving the music itself proper pride of place. Though not shy about criticizing the band's bad middle- and late-period recordings, Freeman does a fine a job of making their best music sing for readers. This book will further stimulate the revived interest in the Allmans, who were a surprise hit at Woodstock II.
Pub Date: Feb. 15, 1995
ISBN: 0-316-29288-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1994
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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