An entertaining rock biography, even if you’re a take-it-or-leave-it fan of the singer.
An unauthorized biography of Stevie Nicks (b. 1948), best known as the lead singer for Fleetwood Mac.
Rock biographer Davis (More Room in a Broken Heart: The True Adventures of Carly Simon, 2012, etc.) begins with his subject’s Welsh ancestry, taking it as a window into the mystical element in many of her songs. Nicks was born in Phoenix but spent much of her youth in California. Music was in her family, with a grandfather who sang country songs in bars and took her along to sing harmony when she was still very young. In high school, she learned guitar and started writing folk songs. Meeting another young guitarist, Lindsey Buckingham, put Nicks on the road to a musical career, though she spent several years waiting tables and hoping for breaks while they scuffled. When Mick Fleetwood came looking for a replacement lead guitarist, the engineer suggested Buckingham. He brought along Nicks, and with the new additions, Fleetwood Mac went from being reliable second-stringers to the hottest group on the planet. Davis gives readers a look into recording sessions and concert tours, playing up the personality clashes and shifting romantic entanglements that made up the mystique of Fleetwood Mac in its heyday. Given the “unauthorized” character of the book, Nicks’ impressions and feelings are more or less secondhand, quoted from interviews by others or guessed at by band mates and friends. This is less a problem than it might be, since Nicks has been fairly open, at least since the early days when the band kept her under wraps. As usual, the author is good at keeping readers—even those not totally enthralled by Nicks’ music—turning pages. Things get slower when Davis recounts her solo career, though there were frequent reunions and continued drama between her and her band mates, especially Buckingham—and, of course, the drug problems and other personal crises that come with being a rock star.
An entertaining rock biography, even if you’re a take-it-or-leave-it fan of the singer.Pub Date: Nov. 21, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-03289-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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
SEEN & HEARD
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