A dazzling, richly researched story impeccably told.
A masterful tale of music, social, and economic history.
In 1965, when poet and essayist Wolff (The Names of Birds, 2015, etc.) was 13, he first heard Bob Dylan’s “sound of anger” on the radio. “Like a Rolling Stone” impressed him mightily. He sought out his earlier albums, and on Dylan’s first, there were two original songs. One was “Song to Woody,” which was “the sound of someone looking back in order to tell the truth.” This led the author to find out more about Woody Guthrie and to hear his music. He discovered a great singer/songwriter and political activist. That search then led him to Arlo Guthrie and his album, “Hobo’s Lullaby,” which included one of his father’s songs, “1913 Massacre.” In Calumet, Michigan, mostly striking mine workers, their wives, and children were having a crowded Christmas party in a large hall when someone falsely yelled “Fire!” In the desperate crush to escape, 73 people died. Listening to the song, Wolff realized Dylan had used the very same melody for his song about Guthrie. The pieces were falling into place: “Follow that darkish vein back to find…what? The history of anger. Hope. The truth.” The author takes us on a stunning, riveting journey as we learn about the young Dylan, Woody, Joe Hill, the famous singer/songwriter and union leader, the small town of Calumet, with its copper-mining operations in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, and the unions and miners who were constantly taken advantage of by management and the mine owners. Along the way, Wolff introduces us to Woody’s fellow activist musician Pete Seeger and noted song collector Alan Lomax. He also tells the story of union organizer Ella Reeve “Mother” Bloor, who first told Woody the Calumet story, and Alexander Agassiz, son of the famous scientist, who hired James MacNaughton as the union-busting manager of the Calumet mine in 1901. Wolff’s elegantly intertwined historical drama is consistently revelatory.
A dazzling, richly researched story impeccably told.Pub Date: June 13, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-245169-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 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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