An unauthorized, captivating life of the pop star, by a British novelist (The Skater's Waltz, 1985) and biographer of the Beatles (Shout!—not reviewed) and the Rolling Stones (Symphony for the Devil, 1984). Born Reginald Kenneth Dwight in 1947 in the London suburb of Pinner, John was a child prodigy of the piano. But nothing about him satisfied his stern RAF-officer father—a failing for which John apparently has felt punished all his life. As his dad rose in rank, the man gave signs that his wife was beneath his station; John says that the couple stayed together much too long for their son's sake. The boy took lessons in classical music, but when his mother brought home an Elvis single, John was lost to pop ever after. Starting with a small group, he landed a minor slot with Beatles publisher Dick James and then met Bernie Taupin, the 17- year-old lyricist who (with one parting) ended up co-writing nearly all of John's songs for 25 years (``Goodbye Yellow Brick Road,'' ``Candle in the Wind,'' etc.). John's fame—which grew more quickly in the US than at home—peaked in 1976 when, disastrously, he told Rolling Stone that he was bisexual. For the next 15 years, the hits remained but the man became an outrageously flamboyant, depressed, pudgy zombie, staying home with his art, record, and car collections, and divorcing after a brief marriage. But today he's still Britain's top-grossing musical act—and, as Norman reveals, has joined A.A. in 1990 and went to a clinic for his bulimia and lifelong weight problems, a move resulting in part, according to the author, from a dramatic spiritual change wrought by time spent at the bedside of child AIDS-victim Ryan White. Slow start, but John's troubled odyssey grows on you and generates rich feelings for the man. (Forty b&w photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: March 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-517-58762-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1992
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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