Those with a passion for the music will enjoy revisiting a time when Bloomfield’s influence exceeded even Stevie Ray...
An exhaustive biography gives the legendary Chicago blues-rock guitarist his due—and then some.
More than a half-century ago, Mike Bloomfield (1943-1981) was routinely ranked with the likes of Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix. His was the guitar that electrified Bob Dylan’s watershed performance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival and that stung its way through his breakthrough “Like a Rolling Stone.” As the lead guitarist for the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, Bloomfield brought extended, jazzlike improvisation to the form and performed with a flamboyance that charged his every gesture. In 1967, he formed a band called the Electric Flag, which added horns to the blues-rock-soul-jazz mix and would attempt to transcend musical genres. But by the early 1970s, Bloomfield walked away from the spotlight—or stumbled and staggered away, a victim of substance abuse, insomnia, insecurity, and an inability to deal with the pressures of the spotlight and the demands of touring and performance. By the time he suffered a fatal overdose in 1981, he had been all but forgotten, a footnote in rock’s progression. “The obscurity Bloomfield longed for in his last decade he achieved posthumously with stunning success,” writes Dann, who has approached his task with an archivist’s expansiveness rather than the selection of detail and stylistic grace that distinguish a biographer’s craft. The author includes every club owner, performance booker, and long-forgotten sideman as well as every recording session in Bloomfield’s slide toward obscurity. Amid the dross, there is a compelling narrative of a young blues fanatic whose problems with drugs and mental instability predated his fame—and who continued to perform in projects for which he had indifference or even contempt because he was so deeply in debt to the manager he had once shared with Dylan.
Those with a passion for the music will enjoy revisiting a time when Bloomfield’s influence exceeded even Stevie Ray Vaughan’s.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4773-1877-5
Page Count: 736
Publisher: Univ. of Texas
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
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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