Wein is eye-crossingly voluble, but he does have a lot of stories, perspectives, and music history to get off his chest.
Garrulous memoir by the music promoter and club owner who brought jazz to the masses through the Newport Jazz Festival.
“I was fortunate enough to have an older brother who set a precedent for underachieving,” writes Wein. We were all fortunate. His brother liked the jazz clubs on 52nd Street more than the classroom, and he brought young George along, nurturing in the boy a love of Art Tatum, Hot Lips Page, Thelma Carpenter, and Frankie Newton. In 1950, Wein opened a club in Boston called Storyville and launched a half-century of jazz promotion. In plain, if at times serpentine, prose (“I think that even after these short moments I thought that perhaps our lives would become permanently intertwined”), Wein tells of ushering practically every jazz musician alive through Storyville’s doors and bestows a little story upon each: Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald (“I developed a blister on my middle finger from snapping to the beat”), Charlie Parker, Lester Young, George Shearing. From these associations he was able to patch together the Newport Jazz Festival, a terrific fusion of art and pop, elusive and foot-tapping that was forever in one form or another of trouble: financial, legal, critical. Wein promoted ferment as much as music; he introduced rock into the jazz festival in 1969 (“Led Zeppelin’s performance was a wall of pure energy”) and electricity into the Newport Folk Festival—another of his brainstorms—in 1965, with Paul Butterfield and Bob Dylan. He managed to infuriate both jazz purists (Nat Hentoff thought Newport was crassly commercial) and folkie diehards: when Dylan launched into “Maggie’s Farm,” Wein writes, “the prevailing feeling among the crowd was a sense that they had been betrayed.” It was also history, and he invites readers to walk along at his side as he made it.
Wein is eye-crossingly voluble, but he does have a lot of stories, perspectives, and music history to get off his chest.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-306-81114-6
Page Count: 542
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 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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