A thoughtful autobiography that takes in not just the tunes, but the times that produced them—a delight for fans.
The legendary Stax artist and composer looks back on a long, fruitful life in music.
“The truth is I was never in it for the money. I loved the people and the music.” So writes Jones, the keyboard wizard who helmed Booker T. & The MG’s, so named for a car one of their producers owned, a group that touched off a revolution in Southern soul music that cleared a path for Otis Redding, Irma Thomas, and dozens of other players. Remarkably, given the time and place, Jones’ band was interracial, with guitarist Steve Cropper and, later, bassist Duck Dunn adding to the mix. The author writes about growing up in a segregated South where it was entirely unexpected that he should know the likes of Dvorak and “Clair de Lune,” music that, along with church gospel, worked its way into compositions such as “Green Onions”—which, as it happens, was born as “Funky Onions” but was renamed for fear that the word would scare off listeners in that benighted time. Jones reflects deeply on matters of race and the many injustices he had to endure. He’s at the top of his form, clearly enjoying the task, when he writes about music, however. One of the book’s many highlights is his mystified childhood realization that while “C was the natural key for the earth, humans, and the universe at large,” other chords had their say, too: B flat for the clarinet, a discovery that “wreaked havoc in my young, developing mind—to find out the C was not really a C, but a B flat in clarinet world.” Fortunately, he overcame his shock to write tunes that shaped the zeitgeist of 1960s pop, such as “Hip Hug-Her” (“the sound…makes it seem like Duck is going to break the string on every note, he pulls it so hard”), and of course “Green Onions,” which countless kids use to learn keyboards.
A thoughtful autobiography that takes in not just the tunes, but the times that produced them—a delight for fans.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-316-48560-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Sept. 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
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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