Essential reading for Reed fans and strongly recommended for anyone interested in rock as art.
A full-length portrait of legendary musician Lou Reed (1942-2013).
Rolling Stone contributing editor DeCurtis (Creative Writing/Univ. of Pennsylvania; In Other Words: Artists Talk About Life and Work, 2005, etc.), who followed Reed’s career closely over the years, claims to be one of the few rock writers Reed respected. Focusing on the music as much as the singer’s often dissolute lifestyle and controversial opinions, the author makes a good case for Reed’s lasting significance. Born in Brooklyn, he moved with his middle-class Jewish family to Long Island when he was a young boy. A rebellious teenager, he began playing in bands early on. At Syracuse University, he came under the influence of the poet Delmore Schwartz, who encouraged him to take writing seriously—and served as a model of the bohemian lifestyle. Moving to New York City, he soon joined up with the future members of the Velvet Underground, who gained cachet by being “adopted” by Andy Warhol. But the band set another pattern that would dominate Reed’s career: an inability to share credit. Singer Nico, installed by Warhol to give the band glamour, and John Cale, who co-wrote many of the band’s songs, were both bones of contention. Reed embarked on a long solo career, marked by alternating flashes of brilliance and gestures that seemed deliberate self-sabotage. DeCurtis faithfully chronicles all of them, with detailed information on recording sessions and Reed’s musical collaborators. He also gives illuminating background information, often drawn from Reed’s personal experiences, on what led to some of the compositions. Despite a flamboyant lifestyle in the gay culture of the day, Reed was an intensely private person, but the author has made every effort to interview those who knew him best. While his assessment of Reed’s importance seems slightly overblown, the book is a well-written, valuable document of a major figure in the American rock scene, putting a human face on a man who often seemed impossibly remote.
Essential reading for Reed fans and strongly recommended for anyone interested in rock as art.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-316-55242-4
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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
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