A remarkable memoir by a remarkable artist.
The memoir of the resilient career of a singer who knows how closely he succumbed to self-parody.
Jones knows how most people think of him: “Tom Jones: panty magnet.” With a tone that suggests that he never takes himself too seriously but knows that he deserves to be taken more seriously as an artist, he relates how the ritual started with one uninhibited female fan and how he instinctively wiped the sweat from his brow and handed them back to her. Thus began a ritual that would become more the focus of a Tom Jones show than the music, with countless women bringing along an extra pair of underwear just to toss. From his days as the teenage son of a Welsh coal miner, Tommy Woodward—later “Twisting Tommy Scott” before settling on the stage name he would ride to fame—knew that he had a powerful voice and that there was an animal magnetism to his presence, though occasionally he found himself the prey of men who could do something for him but wanted something back. He was a huge fan of Jerry Lee Lewis (on whose album he first heard “Green, Green Grass of Home”) and thought Elvis Presley was comparatively contrived. But though he had the voice and soul of a rocker, his career path ended up taking him through the theater circuit and TV, with novelty numbers like, “What’s New Pussycat?” Though he’s not in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, he claims, “there’s more rock ’n’ roll in me than there is in 90%” of those in there. In attitude and anecdote, his engaging and illuminating book backs him up. Perhaps most impressive is the love story with the woman he married almost 60 years ago—after a teenage pregnancy—and the artistic command he has shown in recent years, since he stopped dyeing his hair and started paying more attention to the quality of his material than its pelvis-thrusting potential.
A remarkable memoir by a remarkable artist.Pub Date: Nov. 24, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-59240-961-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Blue Rider Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
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