Well-executed, but for hardcore Bowie fans only.
Exhaustive survey of David Bowie and his music.
Recent years have seen the publication of a variety of Bowie books, most notably the lengthy, impressive biographies by Marc Spitz (Bowie: A Biography, 2009) and Paul Trynka (David Bowie: Starman, 2011). Bowie is an unquestionably influential artist. However, considering all the detailed Bowie-centric material available, what else do we need to know about him? According to Doggett (You Never Give Me Your Money: The Beatles After the Breakup, 2010, etc.), too much Bowie information isn't enough. The author so reveres his subject that he decided to dissect each lyric and every note played by the Thin White Duke. The result is as comprehensive, and exhausting, as one might expect from a 450-page examination of a prolific artist's entire recorded output. This isn't to say that Doggett isn't a competent analyst. In fact, there aren’t many writers who have the combination of classic-rock knowledge, reverence for an artist and sheer patience to successfully pull off this sort of project. Doggett clearly conducted massive amounts of research on his subject, offering both historical context for Bowie's albums and the genesis of nearly every tune, and he’s undyingly passionate about his subject, proudly trumpeting the hits and coolly dissing the misses. For those Bowie-heads who didn't get what they needed from Spitz and Trynka, there are plenty of biographical tidbits sprinkled throughout the book. However, Doggett’s book will have a limited audience.
Well-executed, but for hardcore Bowie fans only.Pub Date: July 31, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-06-202465-7
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
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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