Shaffer’s ingratiating hepcat charm saves what could have been just another celebrity’s autobiographical ego trip.
Late Night with David Letterman veteran recalls his storybook rise from strip-club pianist to musical director of the “World’s Most Dangerous Band.”
Shaffer and co-author Ritz (Hound Dog: The Leiber & Stoller Autobiography, 2009, etc.) deliver a passionate, racy account of how the Ontario-born musician’s love for raunchy R&B piano set him on a much different path than his well-to-do lawyer father envisioned. Although Shaffer’s parents were hip partygoers, they were nevertheless products of the patriarchal Eisenhower Age. After reluctantly studying sociology in college while gigging in local bands, Shaffer came to an agreement with his father: If he wasn’t able to make a living from music within a year, then he would attend law school. Armed with a gift for improvisation and a love for cover tunes, Shaffer worked his way through Toronto dive bars and strip clubs and soon landed a gig as keyboardist for the musical Godspell in the early 1970s. His seemingly effortless rise to industry royalty follows a familiar right-place-at-the-right-time narrative. After toiling on a series of minor Broadway projects, Shaffer got a call from an old Toronto buddy, Howard Shore, the musical director for the Saturday Night Live band. Suddenly he became the hit show’s keyboardist and a resident at New York’s romantically gritty rock-star haunt, the Gramercy Hotel. Though the name-dropping comes thick and fast throughout, to his credit Shaffer never completely settles into the easy rhythms of shallow celebrity-driven anecdote. His reminisces of playing alongside the likes of Bob Dylan, Ray Charles, James Brown and other personal heroes are usually witty and reverent—although the out-of-the-blue chapter on his fascination with Jerry Lewis’s telethons is simply bizarre. As with most celebrity memoirs, the most entertaining bits of the author’s personal history are found on the road to success, not at the destination—in fact, his longtime stint at Letterman is barely mentioned.
Shaffer’s ingratiating hepcat charm saves what could have been just another celebrity’s autobiographical ego trip.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-385-52483-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2009
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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