For blues aficionados, Goins provides a wealth of information on one of the underacknowledged masters of the Chicago sound.
Biography of blues guitarist Jimmy Rogers (1924-1997), who “created a truly enduring sound that has made a direct impact on every generation that followed.”
Without his association with Muddy Waters, Rogers might be just a musical footnote, an artist whose one hit, “Walking by Myself,” enjoyed minimal commercial success. However, as Goins (Director of Jazz/Kansas State Univ.; Emotional Response to Music: Pat Metheny’s Secret Story, 2001) reiterates throughout, Muddy Waters might not have been Muddy Waters without Rogers, whose guitar was integral to perhaps the finest band in the history of Chicago blues. As much as mercurial harmonica master Little Walter or, later, piano stylist Otis Spann, Rogers was integral to the development and popularity of Muddy’s music, complementing the raw Southern sound of the frontman’s vocals and slide guitar. Of the sound that the two guitarists developed together, the author writes, their “relationship…was somewhere between two ballet dancers and two heavyweight boxers. They could sling each other around the room and never lose faith in one’s ability to catch the other. They could throw hard jabs at each other yet never catch a blow to the body.” Goins never lapses into academic impenetrability, and he demonstrates an impressive passion and ear for the music. Particularly lively are his illumination of the bustling Maxwell Street scene and his analysis of the 1970s blues revival in Austin, Texas, and along the coasts, which brought Rogers out of early musical retirement to attain a popularity beyond anything he’d experienced before—as well as financial success, including royalties from the likes of Eric Clapton recording his songs. However, the book could use some judicious cutting and editing, since it seems to include everything that anyone ever said in print about Rogers, as well as the name of every musician, club owner and tour promoter with whom he worked.
For blues aficionados, Goins provides a wealth of information on one of the underacknowledged masters of the Chicago sound.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-252-08017-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Univ. of Illinois
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2014
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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