by David Browne ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 2001
Buckley fans will be pleased by the fruits of Browne’s hungry research—but others may be left to wonder what all the fuss...
A furiously detailed, deeply smitten biography of father and son musicians Tim and Jeff Buckley, from Entertainment Weekly music critic Browne.
Tim Buckley was a 1960s musician who blended folk, jazz, art song, and rhythm and blues with “a tenor as clear and untainted as Irish air.” He attained cult status but was too gratingly experimental to capture a wide audience. That he was self-obsessed and obnoxious—“No, I don’t play that anymore. If you don’t like it, get the hell out of here,” he would suggest to old fans—didn’t help either. Though Browne is clearly taken with Tim’s music, he doesn’t try to buff his rotten behavior, or tidy up his neglect of abandoned son Jeff. Jeff also turned to music, partly as a way to get free from a miserable home life, Browne suggests, and he was just as wide-ranging as his father and had a voice “as big as a cathedral.” While the father played the failed, misunderstood artist, the son cultivated the look of “a sullen male chanteuse who sang as if he were older, wiser, and more heartbroken than he appeared.” Reading here, it is very hard to get a sense of why these two men so absorb Browne when they come across as ditsy and irresponsible: Tim willful to the point of bitterness and Jeff waffling and erratic. Browne’s music critiques are flabby (of Jeff’s one album: “Grace seemed to float above the earth, scouring the landscape for spiritual fulfillment”) and the details can overwhelm (is it important that Jeff briefly rented a house with a red stucco roof?). That father and son died young is tragic, but doesn’t add up to a compelling story.
Buckley fans will be pleased by the fruits of Browne’s hungry research—but others may be left to wonder what all the fuss was about.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-06-107608-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: HarperEntertainment
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2000
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996
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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