Country legend Tanya Tucker tells her tumultuous life story with warmth and modesty. Tucker (born in 1958) lived fast and hard, only settling down in recent years. When she recorded her first hit, ``Delta Dawn,'' the confident 13-year-old introduced herself to her stellar backup band by saying, ``I know my part, boys. Do you know yours?'' She inherited this bravura from her father, who pushed his way through music industry doors on behalf of Tucker. He is omnipresent in the book, sometimes dominating his daughter's professional and personal life, managing her career, and at one point arranging an intervention of family and friends to convince Tucker to check into the Betty Ford clinic. Tucker defends her father throughout, giving him most of the credit for her success. Professionally, the book charts Tucker's growth from a naive young singer to the mature performer and songwriter she has become. Tucker's life has provided much grist for the tabloids over the years, and readers will likely find her version of these notorious episodes compelling. She had a rocky affair with fellow country singer Glen Campbell, with whom she often took drugs. During one argument, he knocked out her two front teeth with his elbow. When Campbell announced that his wife was pregnant and that he wouldn't leave her, Tucker ran off with Merle Haggard. Tucker has two children, both born out of wedlock, and she kept the father's identity secret—even from the father— for some time. Tucker's hard-living and frequent excesses ensure that there are no dull moments in her story. But readers will come to like the singer well enough to wish her less interesting times. (16 pages color photos, not seen)
Pub Date: April 11, 1997
ISBN: 0-7868-6305-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1997
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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