A well-researched music biography best read with some traditional American folk songs playing in the background.
The story of the Weavers, “America’s most popular folk singers.”
It’s not exactly an untold story, given that one member of the group was Pete Seeger and on the fringes of the tale lurks legendary singer/songwriter Woody Guthrie, not to mention the coverage the group received in the popular 1982 documentary The Weavers: Wasn’t that a Time! Nevertheless, longtime music journalist Jarnow (Heads: A Biography of Psychedelic America, 2016, etc.) delivers a by-the-numbers biography of a band whose popular songs and covers earned them plenty of attention during the Red Scare and a place on the blacklist. Most readers think of folk groups as particularly tightknit, but the author reflects equally on the tensions within the group. “The band was a slow-functioning democracy under the best of circumstances,” he writes. On display, too, are the very different personalities of each member: Lee Hays, the contentious bass singer who co-wrote “If I Had a Hammer”; Fred Hellerman, the band’s unsung producer and arranger of songs; Seeger, the driven, multitalented banjo picker whose songs would go on to be huge hits for the next generation of artists like Peter, Paul and Mary and The Byrds; and Ronnie Gilbert, so popular at the time she was simply known as “The Voice.” The author also ably recounts dramatic scenes in the nation’s courtrooms—e.g., Seeger demanding, “do I have a right to sing these songs? Do I have a right to sing them anywhere?” There are also interesting cameos sprinkled throughout this colorful tale, from Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. organizing for civil rights to Bob Dylan—about whom Hellerman exclaimed, “he can’t sing, and he can barely play, and he doesn’t know much about music at all.”
A well-researched music biography best read with some traditional American folk songs playing in the background.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-306-90207-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 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
SEEN & HEARD
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