A life as haunting as the music, and a biography that comes very close to doing it justice. (16 b&w photos)
Sex, drugs, and rhythm and blues punctuate this tormenting story of one of Motown’s greatest voices.
Turner keeps a keen eye on Gaye’s family throughout his biography, beginning with the family’s roots in Jessamine County, Kentucky, and Gaye’s cross-dressing father. After a brief stint in the US Air Force, notable mostly for encounters with Wyoming prostitutes and an honorable discharge from service, Gaye met his mentor Harvey Fuqua, and his singing career slowly blossomed. Eventually catching up with Berry Gordy and the fledgling Motown label, Gaye’s rise to the top was complicated by racist encounters on tour, a troubled marriage to Gordy’s sister Anna, an illegitimate child (fathered with his wife’s niece), and the untimely death (from a brain tumor) of singing partner Tammi Terrell. Excessive drug use led to paranoid delusions of persecution and increasing financial difficulties (from failure to pay child support to dunning by the IRS). The author balances these depictions of Gaye’s troubled personal life with a measured exploration of his singing career, including the commercial success of “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” and the artistic accomplishments of “What’s Going On.” It all came to a sudden end when Gaye was murdered by his father (following a domestic dispute) in 1984—a tragedy that halted a career still vibrant from the recent successes of the single “Sexual Healing” and the album “Midnight Love.” Turner presents a fair and even-handed account of his subject’s life, neither withholding Gaye’s negative qualities (such as blatant misogyny) nor failing to develop a full picture of his musical genius. A stronger editor would have weeded out a few missteps, such as the author’s bizarre digressions into John Steinbeck’s reactions to Beaumont, Texas, and an empty comparison between Gaye and John Lennon.
A life as haunting as the music, and a biography that comes very close to doing it justice. (16 b&w photos)Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-06-019821-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2000
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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