Gushing, not to say ecstatic, exercise in groupiespeak, and a sequel to Des Barres's I'm with the Band (1987). Des Barres's follow-up to her days with the rock fabs begins as a rerun but soon settles into the downside of her glory days: adult life, more or less, though the endless name-dropping requires a rock-'n'-roll directory. As the memoir begins, still-unmarried Pamela Miller, introduced on the Today show as ``Queen of the Groupies'' (``Wow. What a twisted and unique legacy. I never know whether to defend myself or take a bow''), is madly in love with drug-and-booze-ridden Michael Des Barres, a ``glitter-glam'' British rock star who has just helped form a new group, which flops. Insecure Mike and moaning Pam fly to jobs on both coasts and hop over to England to see Mike's parents. Pam's own group, Girls Totally Outrageous, folds, but Pam runs about getting film parts (with Sly Stallone in Paradise Alley, among others) and finding entertainment niches for her talents. But ``the magic dust on the Sunset Strip had turned into sticky wads of filthy goop that stuck to the bottom of my platforms.'' Pam and Mike buddy or room with burgeoning greats Don Johnson, Melanie Griffith, Tom Cruise, and others. Throughout, Pam keeps a diary (excerpted occasionally here), and at last marries bombed-out Mike and has a child. Eventually, Mike joins AA, which works for him, and by book's end is a tower of honesty—but not before he begins playing around during early sobriety, leading to an inevitable separation. Meanwhile, Pam lands a big-time rock star (known here only as ``HIM'') and has a yearlong, super-private sex affair ``on this flaming rocket trip to the stratosphere.'' Dumbfoundingly overripe musk, but just right for the right ears. (Photos—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 17, 1992
ISBN: 0-688-09149-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
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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