Much like Aerosmith’s career, this candid memoir will be cheered by fans, but rock critics will likely be underwhelmed.
Founding member and lead guitarist of American rock band Aerosmith details his life and times in this autobiography.
One of rock’s most enduring and popular bands, Aerosmith has managed the unlikely feat of recording top hits across several decades, gaining a loyal army of fans while failing to win over the acclaim of music critics. Readers of rock autobiographies will find much familiar material here, as early struggles give way to staggering success and the accompanying roller coaster of sex, drugs, rehab, internal band squabbling, villainous management and more. This is well-trod but mostly entertaining ground, and Perry—with the assistance of veteran music writer and ghostwriter Ritz (co-author: Glow: The Autobiography of Rick James, 2014, etc.)—does a decent job keeping things moving. Aerosmith has never been accused of being an intellectual band, but the author takes pains to establish himself as a thoughtful, well-read individual with a love for nature established as a youth wandering in the New Hampshire woods. But his desire to be taken seriously leaves the narrative strangely free of humor; it doesn’t seem like compiling this book was an enjoyable task for Perry. Of the group’s other members, lead singer Steven Tyler is the only fully developed character, and Perry doesn’t hold back in airing his (many) grievances about their relationship. The memories become a little bit sharper once Perry gets sober, and the tale of the band’s entanglement with manager Tim Collins, who seemed to exhibit a cult leader–like control over the group, is perhaps the most interesting part of the book. An appendix written by Perry’s guitar techs is a bonus for guitar geeks.
Much like Aerosmith’s career, this candid memoir will be cheered by fans, but rock critics will likely be underwhelmed.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-1454-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
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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