A must for those with an interest in the music, and of great appeal as well for anyone who enjoys a roistering life story...
Charming, evocative autobiography by one of the key figures in the mid-20th-century folk revival.
The charisma, humor and storytelling chops that made Dave Van Ronk (1936–2002) a Greenwich Village legend are abundantly on display in this memoir, assembled after his death by long-time friend and blues historian Wald. A blue-collar boy from the outer boroughs, Van Ronk dropped out of “Our Lady of Perpetual Bingo” at 15 and headed to the Village to hang out with anarchists and Wobblies. He began his musical life as a jazz fanatic convinced that “folk music was irredeemably square.” But Harry Smith’s paradigm-altering Anthology of American Folk Music in 1951 introduced Van Ronk and a lot of other “neo-ethnics” to the astonishing diversity of traditional American music. They aimed to play it with “authenticity,” scorning the bland sounds of pop-folk acts like the Kingston Trio. Nor did they initially have much interest in writing their own material; among Van Ronk’s many shrewd observations is the reminder that what we now think of as folk music—a singer-songwriter performing self-penned compositions accompanied by an acoustic guitar—is what it was changed into during the ’60s by artists like Tom Paxton, Phil Ochs and Bob Dylan. Big names like Dylan’s enter late in Van Ronk’s narrative, which focuses on the fruitful, unpublicized early years when everyone scraped by with occasional jobs while playing for tips in all-night coffee shops, doing a lot of drinking and dope smoking on the side. It sounds like wonderful fun, and Van Ronk bestrews his pages with sharp, intelligent asides on such matters as the divide between the Cambridge, Mass., folk crowd, who viewed themselves as “pure guardians of the sacred flame” and the more professional singers of the Village, who viewed them as “upper-middle-class kids cutting a dash on papa’s cash.”
A must for those with an interest in the music, and of great appeal as well for anyone who enjoys a roistering life story recounted in a lively narrative voice.Pub Date: May 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-306-81407-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2005
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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