A better-than-average up-from-the-ghetto, as-told-to life story by the R&B diva. Born Jamesetta Hawkins in 1938 in Los Angeles, her remarkable voice won her a featured soloist spot at the local church when she was just a child, and she'd barely hit her teens when she was discovered by L.A. promoter/songwriter Johnny Otis, a Greek man whose soul ``was blacker than the blackest black in Compton.'' Otis gave Etta her stage name and oversaw the recording of her first hit: ``Roll With Me, Henry,'' a double-entendre answer song to the Hank Ballard hit, ``Work With Me, Annie.'' From there, she hit the road, mostly playing small southern towns where she encountered racism at every turn. Her pungent observations about her peers make for amusing reading: Little Richard ``called himself King Richard and would get mad if you didn't recognize his royalty''; James Brown was ``a little dictator, an arrogant lord over the world of his music''; Jackie Wilson ``was incapable of talking about anything but Jackie.'' James also chronicles her regrettable talent for selecting men who used her at best, physically abused her at worst, and an addiction to heroin and other drugs that took her decades to shake. Musically speaking, James's life has also been one of ups and downs. Never quite achieving mainstream success, she moved from pure R&B to light jazz, pop standards, and out-and-out rock 'n' roll in the late '60s and '70s, then returned to form as a funky blues shouter in the '80s. James is well served by coauthor Ritz (Take It Off, Take It All Off, 1993, etc.), who ably captures the singer's feisty tone and does a reasonable job of keeping the narrative moving along. Not exactly an uplifting story, but plenty of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll to keep the fans happy. (8 pages b&w photos, not seen) (Author tour)
Pub Date: June 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-42328-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1995
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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