Music critic Scherman (editor, The Rock Musician, not reviewed, etc.) presents the story of drummer Earl Palmer, one of the foundational figures in rock, who witnessed the changes in race relations and the world of popular music from the vaudeville days to the present. Scherman provides the introduction to each chapter of this biography, and then presents transcriptions from his 125 hours of taped interviews with Palmer. This allows Palmer’s particular blend of New Orleans black dialect and vaudevillian wordplay to take center stage in the story of his life. Recounting everything from his very earliest memories of New Orleans’s Treme neighborhood in the 1920s and ’40s up through the rock scene of the 1980s, Palmer presents a very personal overview of the century. While his worthiness as a biographical figure rests largely on his work with such notables as Ritchie Valens, the Righteous Brothers, Tina Turner, the Beach Boys, and dozens of other rock musicians, he also worked with jazz luminaries like Count Basie, Sarah Vaughan, and Dizzy Gillespie, and thus is able to offer a look at the intersection of these musical realms. Unfortunately, nearly half the book is spent on the minor details of his early life, prior to his arrival in the halls of fame. The oral style also doesn—t serve the book well: Palmer has a tendency to ramble (reading occasionally to a page containing two and three short, vaguely related anecdotes). Palmer’s speech is also far from G-rated; among many crudities are such recollections as “I got bombed off homemade vodka and fucked one of the only chicks that wasn—t big and fat.” Somehow, this fails to seem charming. The final sections detailing his work with major musicians are more engaging and funny, as when he says incredibly of a recording session with rock superstar Neil Young, “I—m telling you, man, I don—t remember it.” While the discussions of rock’s formative years make for interesting reading, Palmer’s personal story does not, and this book will probably appeal most to rock history completists. (32 b&w photos)
Pub Date: April 1, 1999
ISBN: 1-56098-844-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1999
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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