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MAN ON THE RUN

Name: MAN ON THE RUN
Author: Tom Doyle
ISBN: 978-0-8041-7914-0

PAUL MCCARTNEY IN THE 1970S

by Tom Doyle ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 17, 2014

McCartney emerges as more admirable than many readers might have imagined—and more human, too. They’ll want to give his...

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A close-up study of Paul McCartney’s first post-Beatles decade.

It’s one measure of how messed-up the music business is and of how competitive the former band mates were that John Lennon lamented, in the 1970s, that McCartney had amassed a $25 million fortune, much more than Lennon had. Lennon’s pile would quickly grow, though he would not live long enough to enjoy it all, thanks in part to the battery of lawsuits that McCartney fired off to get out of bad deals that the Beatles had signed over the years. By Q magazine contributing editor Doyle’s (The Glamour Chase: Maverick Life of Billy MacKenzie, 1998) account, McCartney left the Beatles bruised and bleeding—and with a penchant not just for a little of the grass he wrote of in “Get Back,” but also for countless bottles of whiskey. His depression cleared and his spirits improved when, holed up on his Scottish farm, he hatched the band that would become Wings, complete with wife Linda as keyboardist and vocalist—even though, as observers were quick to note, she couldn’t quite sing or play. Finding plenty of good to write about Linda all the same, Doyle looks behind the chipper, thumbs-up McCartney to find the complex personality beneath the image: He was an extraordinary musician beset by self-doubt, a countercultural hippie who also had a gift for square-jawed business. (His net worth is estimated at more than $1 billion.) Doyle’s asides are puzzling at times—the McCartneys were famously vegetarian, but he has them enjoying “hot biscuits and country ham”—but he manages to say something new about a public figure about whom countless thousands of books and articles have been written, and he says it well.

McCartney emerges as more admirable than many readers might have imagined—and more human, too. They’ll want to give his albums of the ’70s a fresh spin as well.

Pub Date: June 17, 2014

ISBN: 978-0-8041-7914-0

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Ballantine

Review Posted Online: May 16, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | ENTERTAINMENT, SPORTS & CELEBRITY

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

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...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)