A compact and conversant history that makes the story new again, capturing the Rolling Stones in all their Faustian glory.
A funny, personal, and professional history of the Rolling Stones.
The facts are well-known and have been reported ad nauseam: English poor boys (except for Mick Jagger) form blues band, forsake modest ambition for global domination, soar to immortality on the strength of great songs and classic albums, enjoy enough highs (girls, cars, mansions, drugs) to weather the lows (busts, divorce, addiction, death), and are still going at it, a chugging machine as indestructible as it is increasingly irrelevant. So what does longtime journalist and author Cohen (Monsters: The 1985 Chicago Bears and the Wild Heart of Football, 2013, etc.) bring to this sodden, sordid tale? The passion and disappointment of a fan who knows (and reports) the facts but can’t stop cherishing the myth. As a writer for Rolling Stone, Cohen toured with the band and got close to them, and he seems to have read every single book about the subject; by his own admission, he has studied the Stones “as the ancients studied war. It’s my Hemingway, Dickens, Homer.” Cohen weaves together the peak events with a supple sense of the band’s inner dynamic and unbreakable bonds, and he captures their public and private evolution—whether it’s the way producer Andrew Loog Oldham ratcheted up the band’s hoodlum mystique or how Jagger and Keith Richards mapped out a strategy for long-term success, which ultimately meant wresting control from founder Brian Jones, thus setting in motion the latter’s demise. Cohen sees them up close, such as when he describes Richards literally convulsing his way to sobriety, and far. Here is his succinct overview of the band’s 1969 Altamont disaster: “Mick Jagger had long pretended to be the devil. Then one night he threw a party and the real devil showed up.”
A compact and conversant history that makes the story new again, capturing the Rolling Stones in all their Faustian glory.Pub Date: May 10, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8041-7923-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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