A savvy reminiscence of the era when punk finally paid its debt to society.
Straightforward account of the improbably profitable second coming of punk rock.
British music journalist Winwood (co-author: Into the Black: The Inside Story of Metallica (1991-2014), 2014, etc.) writes with authoritative enthusiasm about the 1990s rise of bands like Green Day and the Offspring and their broader relationship to the always-contentious question, “what is punk?” He argues that since their success, “anyone forming a punk band did so with the knowledge that in doing so it was possible to become suddenly wealthy.” Setting up this improbable cultural watershed, the author briefly covers the initial blast of 1970s and ’80s punk, when powerful bands like Black Flag and the Germs had momentum cut short by police hostility, drug abuse, and changing underground rock trends. So, when bands like Los Angeles’ initially mediocre NOFX and the Bay Area’s beloved Operation Ivy (which morphed into Rancid) and juvenile upstarts Green Day formed, they had little expectation of mainstream success despite the signing explosion following Nirvana’s breakthrough in 1991. As NOFX’s Fat Mike recalls of those lean days, “It was fine because we didn’t know any different and no one bitched about it.” Still, the hardy pre-internet infrastructure of small labels, regional fanzines, and college radio meant that bands could tour and release records, improving their chops beneath the mainstream radar. This was epitomized by Bad Religion co-founder Brett Gurewitz’s Epitaph Records, eventually hugely influential but run on a shoestring during the years when, as band mate Greg Graffin recalls, “the punk scene was completely dismantled.” All this had started to change when Green Day’s commercial breakthrough, “Dookie,” catapulted them into the mainstream, bringing mass attention to the reconstituted punk genre. Winwood captures the halcyon days that followed, which included huge tours, Epitaph’s lucrative prominence, and Green Day’s later triumph with “American Idiot.” Focusing on the personalities behind these epochal bands, the author stays more on the surface than other recent assessments, but his knowing humor will appeal to younger fans and those who were there.
A savvy reminiscence of the era when punk finally paid its debt to society.Pub Date: Nov. 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-306-90274-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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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