As an artist who “left behind…many lifetimes of brilliant music, a legacy that will inspire generations to come,” Chilton...
A thoroughly reported biography illuminating the life and work of one of the more mystifying and influential cult figures in rock.
Few musicians have ever experienced a career trajectory and musical progression quite like Alex Chilton’s (1950–2010). At the age of 16, he enjoyed (if that’s the word) not only his biggest hit, but “the biggest hit single ever recorded in Memphis” with “The Letter” as the lead singer of the Box Tops. Though he was little more than a hired voice, he subsequently established his creative bona fides in Big Star, a band so influential that it all but invented indie rock. That band suffered from a series of recording-label disasters that prevented it from reaching its popular potential at the time, but Chilton subsequently proceeded to confuse his fervent fan base (which increased, along with his influence, as bigger bands such as R.E.M. paid homage) with solo recordings that ranged from abrasively noisy and raw to lounge lizard-y (including “Volare”). It may be hard to find the common denominator, but veteran rock journalist George-Warren (Public Cowboy No. 1: The Life and Times of Gene Autry, 2007, etc.) connects the dots, showing how it all fit together: his Southern upbringing in a family that was patrician, artistic and permissive, his early mood swings, his later suspicion of the music business and rejection of the adulation that belatedly came his way. He became a true bohemian, bedeviled by alcohol, drugs and a penchant for tempestuous romance. He even took an extended hiatus from music to work as a New Orleans dishwasher (and later live in a tent). But he came to terms with his life and legacy before his death at 59, and “he died a happy man,” perhaps the most surprising twist for such a complicated musician and man.
As an artist who “left behind…many lifetimes of brilliant music, a legacy that will inspire generations to come,” Chilton receives the biography he deserves.Pub Date: March 24, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-670-02563-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2014
PROFILES
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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