The first volume of two in what is bound to be the definitive biography of the King. Whereas Albert Goldman, in his infamous trash biography (Elvis, 1981), served up an overstuffed, doped-up Elvis in a one- sided portrait of an American nightmare, Guralnick (Sweet Soul Music, 1986, etc.) takes a more sensible and sensitive approach, tracing the roots of an American dream. The son of a ne'er-do-well father and an unnaturally devoted mother, an only child whose twin brother died at birth, Elvis grew up sheltered and alone. The fact that his father made little attempt to lift his family out of poverty turned out to be a blessing in disguise, because they remained just one tiny rung up the social ladder from their black neighbors—and their music. From an early age, Elvis heard and admired gospel and rhythm and blues. Amazingly, his own style seems to have emerged full-grown; he took only a few guitar lessons, performed little in high school, and to all outward appearances was ``beyond shy,'' in the words of his first producer, Sam Phillips. Thanks to Phillips, who patiently oversaw his first sessions, the real Elvis quickly emerged: a dynamic performer who knew instinctively how to bring his audience to a frenzy and rapidly became a star. Guralnick perfectly captures Elvis's mixture of naãvetÇ and shrewdness: He carried a joy buzzer to his first meeting with RCA executives but also carefully practiced every stage movement for maximum effect. Still, Elvis repeatedly expressed his fears that he would ``go out like a light, just like I came on.'' This volume ends in 1958, when Elvis was inducted into the Army and his beloved mother died. The year marked the end of a youthful innocence and the beginning of a long and sorry decline. A serious, musically literate, and historically attuned biography. An American epic that belongs on every bookshelf. (20 b&w photos) (Author tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 3, 1994
ISBN: 0-316-33220-8
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1994
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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