Sir Paul once remarked to the author, “We were just four kids trying to earn a living.” They were much, much more, of...
A pleasing romp through the Beatles’ annus mirabilis.
The year 1966 was the year of “Revolver,” with the band looking back into “Rubber Soul” and forward into “Sgt. Pepper.” Paul McCartney hung out with Brian Wilson, and sparks—good sparks—flew. Most of all, as London-based music journalist Turner (Popcultured: Thinking Christianly About Style, Media and Entertainment, 2013, etc.) notes in passing, it was a time when John Lennon was happy enough with his mates that he could foresee doing solo projects but keeping the Beatles going: “You need other people for ideas and we all get along fine.” December 1965, when Turner’s account begins, sees the beginning of a new phase that would find the Beatles within the studio and out of the public eye; as he reckons, the Beatles had played 188 gigs in Britain in 1962, but only 50 in 1965, in part because of the demands of worldwide touring but also because they were about to put an end to touring at all, thanks in some measure to some very unpleasant experiences in places like the Philippines. Turner provides some interesting side notes throughout, as with the Beatles’ interactions with Motown and its stars. The account closes a year later, with some interesting divergences; as Turner writes, Lennon and the lads were deep inside “Strawberry Fields Forever,” trying to find the missing element that would turn the song into magic, but broke away from it to record the very different McCartney vehicle “When I’m Sixty-Four,” a song with what Paul called a “rooty tooty” sound. Lennon’s comment about the Beatles’ popularity compared to that of a certain messiah notwithstanding, a splendid time was had by all, and Turner’s account is generally light and lighthearted, if occasionally disjointed.
Sir Paul once remarked to the author, “We were just four kids trying to earn a living.” They were much, much more, of course, and while he breaks little new ground, Turner does a nice job of capturing them at their best.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-247548-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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