Mildly inspirational, fairly clichéd and an extremely tough sell.
Guitarist from platinum-selling metal band gets trashed, has kid, gets born again, writes book.
Melding old-school thrash rock with a Red Hot Chili Peppers-ish, hip-hop-ish attitude, California-based quartet Korn was at the forefront of the 1990s nu-metal movement. They were a hard-partying band, and founding guitarist Brian “Head” Welch often indulged in the stereotypical sex-and-drugs lifestyle right alongside his enabling Korn-ers. Eventually he realized it was difficult to simultaneously spearhead group meth sessions and properly raise his daughter Jennea. On one of his rare days off in 2004, Welch heard his five-year-old happily crooning the Korn tune “A.D.I.D.A.S.” (an acronym for “all day I dream about sex”), which features such kid-friendly lyrics as, “Screwing may be the only way I can truly be free from my f***ed up reality.” It dawned on him that harsh music and harsher substance abuse might not be the best influence on his child. Much to the shock of his bandmates and their fans, he swore off drugs, walked away from Korn and abruptly became a born-again Christian. Welch is a decent, if unexceptional storyteller, and he has good source material to work with: What meathead metal band’s history doesn’t include multiple moments of debauchery? His proselytizing grows repetitive, however, so some may find his autobiography at once alienating and dull. More to the point, it’s schizophrenic—six chapters rock memoir, six chapters religious treatise. Only a small percentage of Korn’s fan base is likely be interested in reading about the guitarist’s spiritual awakening, and hardcore Christians are even less likely to want to read about a sideman from a band they’ve probably never heard of.
Mildly inspirational, fairly clichéd and an extremely tough sell.Pub Date: July 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-06-125184-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2007
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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