A wild ride of fame, friendships, music, and drugs sure to appeal to Blondie fans and 1970s rock in general.
The iconic singer reveals her legendary journey.
In this whirlwind tour of her life, Harry, one of the most photographed faces in music, deploys an irreverent style well suited to her story. Her tales of life before, during, after, and beyond her time with Blondie are intermixed with interludes that capture the eclectic and electric passion she has for the creative process. In a narrative that feels simultaneously heartfelt and spontaneous, Harry recounts close encounters with violence and harassment with the same immediacy as the moments that catapulted Blondie to worldwide fame. Harry doesn’t focus on the challenges of being a woman in the music industry but rather on the collaborations that fueled her creativity. Though her sound and style influenced rock, and especially women in rock, there’s refreshingly little self-congratulation in these pages. Instead, readers will find reflection on life with a budding band and an uncensored view of what it took to succeed. Whether she’s recounting her experiences making clothes, waitressing, meeting artists, or playing early gigs at CBGB, Harry’s intimate portrait often reads like a love letter to a bygone version of New York City. The narrative reflects the energy of the punk and new wave scene as the author weaves personal stories with entertaining descriptions of partying and playing with the likes of the Ramones, Andy Warhol, Iggy Pop, and David Bowie. There is no shortage of notable cameos in Harry’s chronicle of her journey to stardom, and she maintains effervescent senses of humor and grace throughout. From small venues to world tours, bankruptcy to gold records, this account of life behind the fame offers a candid view of the hard work, big breaks, and tough times that came before and after celebrity. The co-founder of Blondie, Chris Stein, provides the introduction.
A wild ride of fame, friendships, music, and drugs sure to appeal to Blondie fans and 1970s rock in general.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-074958-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 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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