It’s only rock ’n’ roll writing, but Sheffield nails it.
Rolling Stone contributing editor Sheffield (Talking to Girls About Duran Duran: One Young Man's Quest for True Love and a Cooler Haircut, 2010, etc.) muses on love, loss, life, Rod Stewart, female Rush fans and much more in an homage to the art and attitude of karaoke.
Moving to New York City in 2000 as a young widower—his wife died at age 31—Sheffield spent most of his time “in a catatonic stupor on my couch, caked in despair and Cheetos dust.” Then he discovered karaoke and met Ally, the astronomer and fellow “rock-geek” he would later marry. Coming from a long line of Irishmen with bad voices, Sheffield found that in karaoke, perfection didn’t matter, effort did: “It’s a place where no-talents and low talents and too-low-for-zero-talents tolerate each other, even enjoy each other, as we commit brutal crimes of love against music.” If perfection is missing, a shared community of momentary rock stardom and mutual support is not. So it was with Ally, his partner in karaoke obsession, but they were, and are, different people. In a long passage containing some solid marriage advice, Sheffield warns to “give up on the idea of perfection”—however, you must work at it. The author wanders far afield, from family memories to karaoke nights in a Florida senior living village to hilarious takes on music’s biggest names—e.g., David Bowie was “the only rock star who ever pretended to be from outer space in order to seem less weird.” Throughout, Sheffield returns to the theme of the mysterious ways music can bring people together, offering hope and renewal. Eschewing cynicism, the author writes with a seemingly effortless blend of evocative pathos and spot-on humor that moves and inspires.
It’s only rock ’n’ roll writing, but Sheffield nails it.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-220762-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: It Books/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013
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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