Beastie Boys fans will devour this book, as will anyone interested in the early days of hip-hop, the art/music/street life...
A lively and accessible account of the Beasties’ decadeslong career, told by the Boys themselves and a coterie of friends and admirers.
The long-awaited first book from co-authors and fellow Beastie Boys Diamond and Horovitz is a fan’s dream. The narrative details the group’s meteoric rise to fame, from their humble beginnings in the New York hardcore scene of the early 1980s, to their first tours (opening for the likes of Madonna and Run-DMC), and on through the many permutations of their music and persona as they held on to their position as standard-bearers in the worlds of music, fashion, and pop culture throughout the ’80s, ’90s, and 2000s. Diamond and Horovitz each wrote roughly half of the chapters, and their respective personalities shine through in their writing styles; they play off each other the way comedy teams do, much as they did when they were on the mic. These chapters alternate with insightful essays from heavy hitters like Luc Sante, Jonathan Lethem, and others as well as goofy rap album–style interludes—e.g., a comprehensive review of all of their music videos by comedienne Amy Poehler. The book is often laugh-out-loud funny, especially when Horovitz narrates, and Diamond’s comparatively dry sense of humor makes him the perfect foil. The fact that third Beastie Adam Yauch (1964-2012) wasn’t around to contribute lends the book an elegiac tone that bubbles just under the surface of the narrative. Superfans may long for more details from the later years of the group's career; the amount of space devoted to the band’s formative years is huge. There are, however, song-by-song details for all of their records, which will delight the faithful, and the aforementioned “interludes” fill out the overall picture quite well.
Beastie Boys fans will devour this book, as will anyone interested in the early days of hip-hop, the art/music/street life of New York City in the 1980s, and the alternative-nation zeitgeist of the ’90s.Pub Date: Oct. 30, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9554-1
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
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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