Uncertain in organization and thin on insight—a blown opportunity.
A veteran reggae observer offers her take on an icon’s defining statement.
Goldman (Bob Marley, 1981) seems perfectly situated to write a compelling fly-on-the-wall book about the late reggae star’s 1977 album Exodus (named “Album of the Century” by Time magazine in 1999). Formerly features editor for the defunct British music weekly Sounds, she interviewed Marley frequently in Jamaica (where she stayed in his home for a time) and London, attended sessions for Exodus and accompanied the Wailers on their ’77 European tour. She takes a muddled trek through an interesting story. Goldman’s digressive account is mired by the enormous amount of backstory she must tell: Marley’s long apprenticeship in the island’s music business, the finer points of the Rastafarian faith and its connection with Judeo-Christian thought and the tangled and violent intrigues of ’70s Jamaican politics. A third of the book has gone by before Goldman arrives at her tale’s flashpoint event: the politically motivated December 1976 attempt on Marley’s life at his Kingston home, which led to his flight to London. There, the Wailers undertook studio work that resulted in not one but two albums, Exodus and its lightweight 1978 sequel Kaya (which she deals with only in passing). Despite a wealth of firsthand knowledge and copious new interviews, Goldman fails to bring the reader closer to an understanding of the record—a compelling mix of spiritual anthems and blissful love songs—or the deepest motivations of the artist who created it. A labored look at interpretations of the biblical exodus through artistic history stops the book dead in its middle section, while observations about the intersection of punk and reggae similarly bog it down near the end. An anecdote-studded track-by-track analysis of the album is no better than what one finds in other making-of tomes by less-savvy musical trainspotters.
Uncertain in organization and thin on insight—a blown opportunity.Pub Date: May 1, 2006
ISBN: 1-4000-5286-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Three Rivers/Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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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