by Tim Riley ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 3, 1992
Riley, author of the best study by far of the Beatles' song catalogue (Tell Me Why, 1988), turns now to Bob Dylan—``the most important American rock 'n' roller since Presley''—with impressive, but less consistently persuasive, results. As before, Riley steers clear of biography and simply goes chronologically, album-by-album, song-by-song, through the Dylan oeuvre—including unreleased tracks, bootleg recordings, live concert tapes, and concert films. In fact, unlike most Dylan critics, Riley declines to link the songs to the life, contending (not always convincingly) that Dylan turns his ``intimate trials'' into ``public metaphors''—in contrast to ``self-serving,'' Me- decade types like James Taylor. Throughout, Riley stresses Dylan's humor, the satire implicit in his ``bad'' singing, his manipulations of his persona, and his eclectic roots. There's sharp criticism as well as enthusiasm here: The Times They Are A-Changin' succumbs to ``folkie social preening and black-and-white moralism''; Blonde on Blonde is a ``tour de force of obscurantist rock poetics''; ``I Shall Be Released'' is an ``overpraised and overplayed potboiler.'' Riley applauds Dylan's return to ``roots'' in his work with The Band and his country-ish albums but is pretty much appalled by the ``stringent and pious'' born-again albums. And, in contrast to many hard-core Dylan-ites, Riley finds little evidence of a revitalized Dylan once his ``slide'' begins circa 1978. Not everyone will buy Riley's attempt to view Dylan's weaknesses—the clichÇs, the slurred diction, etc.—as ``postmodernist.'' His dense, imagistic evocations of the songs occasionally become precious or strained. (`` `Idiot Wind' is an emotional soapbox as fearsome and cutting as any of the cutlery that flies in Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?'') But, with full attention given to Dylan as performer and writer, to cover versions and disciples (Springsteen, Neil Young), and even to other Dylan-commentators, this is an essential book for Dylanologists: comprehensive, knowing, challenging.
Pub Date: Aug. 3, 1992
ISBN: 0-394-57889-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1992
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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006
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
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by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996
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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