McCartney emerges as more admirable than many readers might have imagined—and more human, too. They’ll want to give his...
A close-up study of Paul McCartney’s first post-Beatles decade.
It’s one measure of how messed-up the music business is and of how competitive the former band mates were that John Lennon lamented, in the 1970s, that McCartney had amassed a $25 million fortune, much more than Lennon had. Lennon’s pile would quickly grow, though he would not live long enough to enjoy it all, thanks in part to the battery of lawsuits that McCartney fired off to get out of bad deals that the Beatles had signed over the years. By Q magazine contributing editor Doyle’s (The Glamour Chase: Maverick Life of Billy MacKenzie, 1998) account, McCartney left the Beatles bruised and bleeding—and with a penchant not just for a little of the grass he wrote of in “Get Back,” but also for countless bottles of whiskey. His depression cleared and his spirits improved when, holed up on his Scottish farm, he hatched the band that would become Wings, complete with wife Linda as keyboardist and vocalist—even though, as observers were quick to note, she couldn’t quite sing or play. Finding plenty of good to write about Linda all the same, Doyle looks behind the chipper, thumbs-up McCartney to find the complex personality beneath the image: He was an extraordinary musician beset by self-doubt, a countercultural hippie who also had a gift for square-jawed business. (His net worth is estimated at more than $1 billion.) Doyle’s asides are puzzling at times—the McCartneys were famously vegetarian, but he has them enjoying “hot biscuits and country ham”—but he manages to say something new about a public figure about whom countless thousands of books and articles have been written, and he says it well.
McCartney emerges as more admirable than many readers might have imagined—and more human, too. They’ll want to give his albums of the ’70s a fresh spin as well.Pub Date: June 17, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8041-7914-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014
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
SEEN & HEARD
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