An engrossing cultural narrative, riddled with bombastic prose.
A detailed biography of the Rolling Stones, emphasizing musical minutiae and salacious recollections.
Davis (Jajouka Rolling Stone, 1993, etc.) leaves no “stone” unturned in this close examination of the Stones’ early-1960s formation and rapid dominance of rock culture, despite strife that would end the careers of most. Davis insists, sometimes pretentiously, that the confluence of events that brought together Brian Jones, Keith Richards, and Mick Jagger among postwar British blight represents a quasi-religious, signal cultural moment: “The Rolling Stones story does have a pantheistic mythos about it.” Davis acknowledges the crucial transformation of Missisippi Delta blues into the amplified urban variety played by Muddy Waters and Sonny Boy Williamson, which provoked a late-’50s European cognoscenti cult. It was on this early blues-worshipping circuit that the Rolling Stones formed, out of various cobbled-together R&B combos. Davis hones in on how their distinct personalities—Jones’s curiosity and sadism, Jagger’s raw sensuality and business acumen, and Richards’s dark appetites and assured playing—along with the talents of relatively “normal” drummer Charlie Watts and pianist Ian Stewart, formed a surprisingly adaptive rock-’n’-roll juggernaut. Between 1962 and 1966, they conquered “Swinging London,” and then became British teen sensations—somewhat incongruously, given their borrowed American R&B stylings. The Stones responded to 1960s turmoil with a remarkable series of albums and singles (Let It Bleed, etc.) that competed with Dylan, Hendrix, and the Beatles for rock primacy, despite a descent into debauchery that included Jones’s mysterious death, the murderous debacle of Altamont, Jagger’s participation in the doomed porn-art film Performance, and Richards’s alcoholism and heroin addiction. Yet the ’70s and ’80s saw the Stones become an increasingly profitable, corporate rock warhorse, their personal, legal, and tax difficulties notwithstanding. Davis skillfully recreates this brittle milieu of sleazy fame, in which figures like Andy Warhol, Gram Parsons, Chuck Berry, and Marianne Faithfull appear alongside the Hells Angels, underage groupies, and seemingly every hustler who ever nourished the band’s dark desires.
An engrossing cultural narrative, riddled with bombastic prose.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2001
ISBN: 0-7679-0312-9
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2001
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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