An up-to-date and revealing rock biography that sets a standard of completion that will likely prove hard to beat.
A full account of the singularly influential English band, drawing on extensive research and interviews with some (but not all) of the major players.
Ever since they broke up 25 years ago, The Smiths have been subjected to an endless stream of biographies and cultural studies. So what does Fletcher (The Clash: The Music that Matters, 2012, etc.) have to add? Up-close scrutiny and a broad sense of perspective. He takes in the local history, delving into the 19th-century politics that formed the gloomy industrial landscape of Manchester, U.K., and shaped the lives of two of its sons: an asexual, vegan, Oscar Wilde wannabe named Morrissey and a T. Rex-worshipping prodigy named Johnny Marr. Fancying themselves the next Leiber and Stoller, they hired bassist Andy Rourke and drummer Mike Joyce and set out on an extraordinary five-year run. Lush, decadent, mopey ballads—about bullying, pedophilia, murder and all-around terminal alienation—appeared at such a frantic rate that not even four studio albums could contain them; some of their best works were singles that arrived in bursts of inspiration. Fletcher, working with the full cooperation of Marr and Rourke, but not Morrissey and Joyce, delivers a credible view of life from inside this whirlwind; he captures the lightning-in-a-bottle chemistry of the two leads and closely follows the band’s brief journey from local indie curio to New Wave phenomenon. It isn’t always smooth sailing; the endless backstage business details are a drag to read, and at times (although not always), Fletcher is too charmed by Morrissey to notice just how unpleasant he can be (especially when he’s fantasizing about murdering Margaret Thatcher or romanticizing suicide).
An up-to-date and revealing rock biography that sets a standard of completion that will likely prove hard to beat.Pub Date: Dec. 4, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-307-71595-1
Page Count: 672
Publisher: Crown Archetype
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2012
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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