A gift for Beatles fan.
A lively firsthand recollection of the Fab Four.
British singer, musician, record producer, and host of SiriusXM’s radio program From Me to You, Asher makes his book debut with a bright, rambling memoir about his long association with the Beatles, which began in 1963 when Paul McCartney, who was dating Asher’s sister, moved into his house. At the time, Asher was half of the duo Peter & Gordon, performing in pubs, clubs, and coffeehouses, and soon under contract with the prestigious EMI Records. Asher eventually quit performing to become head of A&R for Apple Records, where he managed such artists as James Taylor, Linda Ronstadt, Cher, and Diana Ross. The author’s self-described “personal and at times idiosyncratic” take on Beatles music, which follows their playlist alphabetically, is bursting with anecdotes about each song’s composition and the circumstances of recording it. He opines on the songs’ structure, content, effect, and quality, and he digresses about anyone and everyone associated with the Beatles—collectively and individually—as well as performers connected to his career as a record producer. Reading this memoir is like listening to an entertaining, though nonstop, monologue from someone reprising a golden time, blithely jumping from one memory to another as new thoughts and stories pop into his mind. Halfway through his “alphabetically inspired yet meandering pace,” Asher arrives at the letter L, which gives him a chance to comment on “Love Me Do,” the Beatles’ first single, and also on Sean Lennon and Julian Lennon, whose musicianship Asher much admires. “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” writes the author, was inspired by Julian’s childhood drawing of his friend Lucy, “against a sparkly sky”—and not, as some have speculated, about LSD. The letter Q gives Asher pause: He writes about “Queenie Eye,” a solo McCartney song, and expounds on the Quarrymen, string quartets, and what he deems is the quietest Beatles song (“Blackbird”).
A gift for Beatles fan.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-20959-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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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