Both an indelible portrait of the artist as a weird young man and an elegant survey of one of the most vital and...
Former Musician and Life editor Scherman (Backbeat: Earl Palmer’s Story, 2000) and Rolling Stone founding editor Dalton (Edie Factory Girl, 2006, etc.) offer a comprehensive reappraisal of the ’60s heyday of pop-art savant Andy Warhol.
The authors focus on the techniques and governing philosophy of the work that profoundly influenced both “high” and “low” culture, effectively collapsing the barrier between the two. Examining Warhol’s most fertile period, roughly 1961 to the artist’s near-fatal shooting in 1968, Scherman and Dalton marshal a staggering amount of research and copious interviews with Warhol’s associates to provide new insights into the creation of the famous images of soup cans and soda bottles, serial celebrity portraits, multimedia happenings and experimental films that alternately energized and horrified the fine-art establishment. Though the authors concentrate mostly on the work itself, it is so inextricably tied to Warhol’s personality that a psychological portrait of the artist emerges. Warhol, morbidly shy and insecure, sexually stymied and determinedly vague and affectless, inserted himself into the heart of the culture through a native sense of canny manipulation and an infallible eye for design. Childish, casually cruel and ruthless in his personal and professional relationships, Warhol stands as a monument to the power of passive aggression. Vivid portraits of such Warhol-adjacent luminaries as Jasper Johns, The Velvet Underground, Bob Dylan and Factory “superstars” Edie Sedgwick and Gerard Malanga provide much of the narrative’s color, elements that recombined in endlessly fascinating and fruitful ways with Warhol as the gnomic, giggling catalyst.
Both an indelible portrait of the artist as a weird young man and an elegant survey of one of the most vital and revolutionary periods in American popular culture—a richly detailed, kaleidoscopic treat.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-06-621243-2
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
Well-told and admonitory.
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
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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