Ultimately, there’s too much "Of Meds and Men" and too little of the music that made Colvin popular.
A chatty, but only occasionally enlightening, life story from the confessional singer-songwriter.
Three-time Grammy winner Colvin’s life has long been a source for her songs, but it wears thin in her memoir. She’s frank about the many ups and downs of her personal life and career, where the slow climb to commercial and critical success meant overcoming a series of personal disasters: alcoholism, anorexia, clinical depression, panic disorder and numerous broken romances. In perspective, it’s an inspiring story, as Colvin spent years of paying dues and saw her first album, Steady On, win a Grammy. She has overcome a lot, and is apparently content with her life as a respected singer and devoted mother. Unfortunately, the book too often bogs down into the territory of many numbing addiction chronicles, padded with daily affirmations, mad shopping binges and the usual dreary details of life on the road. At times, the book feels like a therapeutic chore. For patient readers and close listeners of her music, there is some payoff when Colvin discusses her songs and the writing process: how “Diamond in the Rough” put her in the odd position of co-writing “a song with someone about breaking up with that someone” or how “if you can get one good line or verse right at the beginning, the song will be set up well for you.” Also: “the act of performing a new song in front of people is the ultimate bullshit detector.”
Ultimately, there’s too much "Of Meds and Men" and too little of the music that made Colvin popular.Pub Date: June 5, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-06-175959-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2012
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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