In the past decade, Bennett has been experiencing a renaissance among listeners. Many of them should be happy to hear how he...
The nonagenarian singer expresses his gratitude to many of the people who have helped him along the way.
With the help of NPR host Simon, Bennett presents not so much a memoir as a collection of sweet, uplifting tributes to people ranging from Abraham Lincoln to Lady Gaga as well as places, including Astoria in Queens, New York; the small town of Pyrites in upstate New York; and, of course, San Francisco, where Bennett famously left his heart. Each chapter concludes with a lesson the author has learned or a bit of wisdom gained from the subject of the chapter. Duke Ellington taught him never to worry “about going into or out of style,” and Lena Horne’s resilience made him think, “when life sends you difficulties or misfortunes, don’t get mad or sad—get busy.” From both Fred Astaire, who “used to float past” Bennett’s house on his regular morning walk, and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, the singer learned the same lesson: trim your work down to its essence. His own chapters are neat and modest. If they don’t tell readers much about Bennett’s inner life, home life, or any turmoil he might have experienced over the decades, they do paint miniportraits of many of the people who helped him on his path. Many of them, as might be expected, are musicians or songwriters, like Amy Winehouse, whose death he laments, and Ella Fitzgerald, whose albums provide a “purely joyful experience.” The author also salutes family members, like his father, who died when Bennett was 10, and painters such as Picasso and John Singer Sargent. The volume is illustrated with small reproductions of many of Bennett’s paintings, which he signs with his birth name, Anthony Benedetto.
In the past decade, Bennett has been experiencing a renaissance among listeners. Many of them should be happy to hear how he got to this point.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-247677-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2016
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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