Informative and detailed, but intended for the Kiss Army, not civilians.
Amalgam of material gathered in 1979 and contemporary interviews with members and associates of the veteran theatrical rock band Kiss.
Credit for honesty goes to TV writer/producer Leaf, who opens by urging, “If you are not a Kiss fan, put this book down.” That sums up the flavor and purpose of this collaboration. In 1979, Leaf interviewed the four original Kiss members (Ace Frehley, Paul Stanley, Gene Simmons, and Peter Criss) for a never-issued authorized biography focused on the group’s rapid rise from cult band to touring phenomenon. This forms the first section, followed by the contributions of music journalist and Kiss admirer Sharp, who urged Leaf to revive the old manuscript. He begins with a 30-page essay covering the “non-makeup years” following the original band’s breakup, then presents what he terms an “oral history” of Kiss. These interviews provide the heart of this hagiography, discussing nearly every song the band ever recorded and other minutiae—details of tours, merchandising, comic books, behind-the-scenes mishaps—of interest mainly to diehards. Leaf’s workmanlike bio certainly captures the spirit of the brief moment when Kiss was on top, although the sunny, managed tone of the band’s comments to him contrast with Sharp’s account of their commercial decline and infighting. The later interviews are more revealing, although much of the subject matter was covered in Simmons’s acerbic memoir. Since Kiss and Make-Up (2001) devoted much space to slagging recalcitrant members Frehley and Criss, it seems fair that they have their say here; they come across as spacey and vain, but not mean-spirited like Simmons. Surprisingly candid on such topics as the prevalence of payola, sales shenanigans, and chart-fixing in the ’70s music industry, the musicians are vague on the intimate details of their travails in the ’80s and ’90s, before a 1996 reunion in makeup presaged Kiss’s profitable second coming as a metal-nostalgia act.
Informative and detailed, but intended for the Kiss Army, not civilians.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2003
ISBN: 0-446-53073-5
Page Count: 448
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2003
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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