An intimate perspective on Cobain’s short life, told in the spirit of burnishing a friend’s legacy.
A sentimental but precisely rendered account of the life of Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain by one of his first music industry backers.
Goldberg (In Search of the Lost Chord: 1967 and the Hippie Idea, 2017, etc.) was a key player in the 1990s alternative rock explosion, moving from his management agency, Gold Mountain, to Atlantic Records. In between, he connected with Nirvana when the Seattle band was young, untested, and hungry. He recalls those early days: “Kurt connected very deeply with the audience….It was a particular form of rock ’n’ roll magic I’d never witnessed before.” Regarding his role in the band’s meteoric rise following 1991’s “Nevermind,” Goldberg re-examines old debates about “selling out” and the industry’s role in dispersing the regional punk-rock underground. Admitting his unfamiliarity with the scene that inspired the young Cobain, the author’s writing is most acute in revealing the complex machinations of the ’90s pop music industry, which was reliant on radio and MTV. As Goldberg shepherded Nirvana to David Geffen’s DGC Records, he recalls, “in marketing terms, the band wanted to keep its credibility with its early fans while also pulling in lots of new ones.” The author provides a close-up take on the familiar tale of what happened next, covering Cobain’s contradictory, sometimes-hostile responses to stardom, his attempts to stay true to an artistic vision, and his distress regarding media coverage of his marriage to Courtney Love. He focuses on Cobain’s loyalty to his circle, kindness, generosity, and artistic temperament. Though he mostly elides examination of his flaws, Goldberg acknowledges they were always part of his creative development, and he provides a terse account of Cobain’s sad, chaotic decline. Cobain returned Goldberg’s regard, calling him “the most honest man in show biz.” Some will note the author’s continued loyalty to the perspective of Love, a controversial figure for many Nirvana fans; still, Goldberg comes off as likable, a successful insider still befuddled by Cobain’s demons.
An intimate perspective on Cobain’s short life, told in the spirit of burnishing a friend’s legacy.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-286150-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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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