One of the best rock memoirs of recent years and a revelation for fans.
The legendary piano master tells all, and delightfully.
Reginald Dwight (b. 1947) grew up with parents who “should never have got married in the first place.” Thankfully, he found deliverance in rock ’n’ roll, in which, his father commanded, “you are not to get involved.” Get involved he did, playing with a band called Bluesology that, he admitted, was pretty much like any other British white blues band, and perhaps a little less, save for a chance pairing with Long John Baldry, “maybe the greatest 12-string guitarist the UK has ever produced.” Another chance union was with a young songwriter named Bernie Taupin, who looked out on the moors and saw the Wild West. Changing his name to Elton Hercules John to shed his former skin, the astoundingly gifted pianist threw audiences into confusion; though “Britain’s least convincing flower child,” he played sort-of-hippie music, but in boas and platforms. “I started to think more about how I looked onstage,” he writes of the period around the era-defining “Your Song,” but he also realized that smashing up a piano, as opposed to Pete Townshend’s smashing a guitar, just didn’t work. He was famous from his first record on, and then rich, and then a study in addictive personality. A highlight, or perhaps lowlight, of the narrative is when, coked to the gills, he insists that Bob Dylan shed his hobo clothes for something in his glittery wardrobe only to have George Harrison caution him, “I really think you need to go steady on the old marching powder.” Now sober, a cancer survivor, and in his 70s, Sir Elton looks back at it all with grace and good humor. One might wish only that he spent as much time revealing how he came to such things as the astonishing structure of “Tiny Dancer” as he does recounting bad hair transplants and bad behavior. Even so, his memoir is a terrific read.
One of the best rock memoirs of recent years and a revelation for fans.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-14760-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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
SEEN & HEARD
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