A solid memoir mostly for fans of the band.
A coming-of-age memoir about how the Canadian twin sisters became successful recording artists.
When they started high school, Tegan and Sara Quin considered themselves oddballs, outcasts, and misfits. They were big music fans—Nirvana, Green Day, the Smashing Pumpkins—but had no particular musical aspirations. Other than being identical twins, there was not much to distinguish them from other teenagers trying to navigate the awkward years—certainly nothing to suggest that they would soon become young recording stars and icons of the burgeoning LGBTQ community. These were pivotal years for the sisters, and their musical success would prove transformative. However, music almost seems like an afterthought here, as the authors proceed in alternating chapters to show how their experience was fairly typical. They did lots of drugs, got blackout drunk on occasion, went to parties that got out of control, experienced their sexual awakenings, and wrestled with their sexual identities. Both had boyfriends and girlfriends, and both struggled with the issue of whether a particular girl was her best friend or something more. They also fought a lot. The music came when they found a guitar that belonged to their stepfather and separately began writing songs and then harmonizing with each other’s songs. The sisters also hid many of their experiences from each other, so it proved cathartic to write and share. “I wrote lyrics that sometimes felt too close to the bone,” remembers Sara, recalling how the unraveling of her relationship with her girlfriend contributed to her songwriting surge. After arranging the song with her sister, she writes, “when we finished, I felt lighter.” Their friends became fans of their music, and a self-recorded cassette helped expand that fandom. Winning a prestigious talent contest earned them studio time, and they marked their 18th birthdays by signing with one of the recording labels that had been pursuing them.
A solid memoir mostly for fans of the band.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-982112-66-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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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