This unusually absorbing book will enthrall Cockburn fans and anyone interested in the life of a serious artist committed to...
The Canadian folk/rock singer-songwriter recalls a nomadic life spent witnessing the social and political crises of our time through song.
Cockburn (b. 1945) proves to be a natural storyteller in this debut, which begins with his shy, lonely childhood growing up in a comfortable Ottawa family and traces his rise as a celebrated guitarist who moved from 1960s coffeehouses to concert halls to such hit recordings as “Wondering Where the Lions Are” (1980) and “If I Had a Rocket Launcher” (1984). Known for his eclectic musical tastes—jazz, rock, blues, reggae, folk, country—he entered the Canadian Music Hall of Fame in 2001. Writing with intelligence and candor, he tells how other artists—from Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg to Doris Lessing and Christian/occult author Charles Williams—influenced his thinking and work and sparked his lifelong activism against war, injustice and exploitation. Cockburn reflects at length on his keen interest in Christian mysticism and the “active benevolence” of the Bible, his view of his protest songs as cries of spiritual anguish, and his travels to troubled parts of Central America, Africa and elsewhere, where injustices touched him and turned into songs like “Rocket Launcher,” which he wrote after meeting with survivors of genocide against Mayan people by Guatemalan militias. “What doesn’t kill you makes for songs,” he writes. Long repressed and preferring “a covert life,” Cockburn writes that it took him many years to feel comfortable performing for audiences and to break out of the “bonds of isolation for the infinitely elastic bag of human absurdity.” He recalls his early unsuccessful marriage and subsequent intimate relationships with a series of strong women, including an unidentified “Madame X,” who helped him open up emotionally in the 1990s.
This unusually absorbing book will enthrall Cockburn fans and anyone interested in the life of a serious artist committed to his music and progressive causes.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-0061969126
Page Count: 544
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 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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