Reverent and informative, but too distanced from its subject.
Former Kerrang! editor Brannigan’s scattershot attempt at presenting a definitive biographical portrait of reluctant rock star Dave Grohl.
The author’s unauthorized bio of Nirvana drummer turned Foo Fighters front man Dave Grohl is his first book, and in some ways it reflects the author’s lack of experience. Brannigan allows his subject’s personal history to be swallowed up by the larger cultural history that his bands helped to shape. For example, when broaching the subject of Grohl’s early interest in punk, the author provides a mediocre textbook history of punk rock, followed by a surface-skimming overview of the Washington, D.C., hardcore scene that would eventually lure Grohl into its clutches. Grohl was a high-school dropout touring with hardcore bands by the time he was 17; yet he was rarely the dominant personality in any of his bands, from his younger days in hardcore outfits Dain Bramage and Scream, to his drumming duties in world-conquering grunge band Nirvana. Brannigan begins to deal with Grohl’s tenure in Nirvana during the peak of that band’s success around 1992. Even in his own post-Nirvana project Foo Fighters, it wasn’t until almost a decade into this second career that he finally embraced his public role as bandleader. Brannigan, obviously stretching his limited access to Grohl, takes a bio-by-the-numbers approach to the Foo Fighters legacy. We’re privy to a few mild controversies and personality clashes during the making of each album, as well as the predictable listing of critical notices from the rock press and Grohl's always-brief side of things. If this book is a reliable measure, Grohl is a simple, uncontroversial, not-particularly-quotable guy who saves his self-expression for his music. If nothing else, Brannigan salutes a musician who’s surfaced, prosperous and sane, from the perils of an extended punk-rock adolescence that not all of his friends survived.
Reverent and informative, but too distanced from its subject.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-306-81956-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2011
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
