Dense and definitive—best appreciated with a record player handy.
A comprehensive chronicle of the jazz legend’s life.
The name Thelonious Monk (1917–1982) has long been surrounded by a kind of tragic mystique. Few question his unparalleled talent, but the taint of mental illness has cast him as a bit of an outsider. With this encyclopedic portrait, Kelley (History and American Studies and Ethnicity/Univ. of Southern California; Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, 2002, etc.) attempts to correct the many misconceptions, both personal and musical, that haunted Monk throughout his life and attended his image in the press. To combat the charge that Monk had no formal training and no knowledge of classical music, the author offers numerous examples from his childhood and teen years, when he rattled off Rachmaninoff at top speed. Kelley’s anecdotes show a humorous, generous and outspoken man who was beloved by family and friends—almost the opposite of the brooding, quizzical persona with which he greeted the press. From his formative years in the fertile soil of 1930s Harlem, Monk was a New Yorker through and through. He struggled to rise from penury and play his music for audiences that didn’t really understand his “weird” chord progressions and unique rhythms. Eventually he achieved the recognition he deserved, though his rise to success was long and difficult. At the height of his career, mental illness plagued him everywhere but at the piano. Written with the full cooperation of Monk’s wife, there can be little doubt that Kelley gets the facts straight. He includes plenty of firsthand accounts from those who knew the musician best, and his actions are meticulously recorded. However, few of Monk’s own words make it onto the pages, and the author does not attempt to devise overarching themes from his experiences. Ultimately the subject remains elusive. The degree of detail in this straight-ahead biography makes it unsuitable for the casual fan, but jazz aficionados will cherish it.
Dense and definitive—best appreciated with a record player handy.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-684-83190-9
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2009
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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