Hagiographic, rags-to-riches, writer-as-middle-class-hero tale; the first biography of a genre master who wrote 18 highly literate detective novels featuring southern California private eye Lew Archer and earned an enormous following among mainstream readers, academes, and literary celebrities. Kenneth Millar (his real name) died at the age of 67 in 1983 of Alzeimers in Santa Barbara, where he lived for most of his adult life with his wife, the Canadian mystery novelist Margaret Sturm Millar. The son of an itinerant newspaper editor, Millar was raised by relatives in central Canada after his family fell apart. An athletic, bisexual loner, he wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on Colerdige while teaching at the University of Michigan and turning out detective mysteries based on Greek tragedies, with complex characterizations, intricately detailed southern California settings, and Millar’s distinctively rueful compassion for lost children. Among his early fans were New York Times critics Anthony Boucher and John Leonard, who stage-managed Macdonald’s ascent to international fame with enthusiastic praise. Nolan, a biographer of rockers Jimi Hendrix and the Allman Brothers Band (not reviewed) and mystery reviewer for the Wall Street Journal, finds few faults in the shy, slow-talking “philosopher king of detective novelists,” even if Millar seems to have had little understanding of the forces that pushed his tormented alcoholic daughter to suicide. Still, it’s hard not to cheer when Macdonald’s literary idealism, his faith in hard work, his support of lesser-known writers, and his relentless urge for middle-class respectability produce a body of work that brings its author most of the rewards, awards, rave reviews, Hollywood deals, fan worship, and happiness that the writing business can offer. A breathlessly enthusiastic font of praise—most of it justifiable—that also works as a schematic for the demons, both professional and personal, that motivate some of our best writers to toil tirelessly in the genre fields.
Pub Date: March 12, 1999
ISBN: 0-684-81217-7
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1999
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
An enjoyable slice of 20th-century music journalism almost certain to provide something for most readers, no matter one’s...
Music journalist and musician Wald (Talking 'Bout Your Mama: The Dozens, Snaps, and the Deep Roots of Rap, 2014, etc.) focuses on one evening in music history to explain the evolution of contemporary music, especially folk, blues, and rock.
The date of that evening is July 25, 1965, at the Newport Folk Festival, where there was an unbelievably unexpected occurrence: singer/songwriter Bob Dylan, already a living legend in his early 20s, overriding the acoustic music that made him famous in favor of electronically based music, causing reactions ranging from adoration to intense resentment among other musicians, DJs, and record buyers. Dylan has told his own stories (those stories vary because that’s Dylan’s character), and plenty of other music journalists have explored the Dylan phenomenon. What sets Wald's book apart is his laser focus on that one date. The detailed recounting of what did and did not occur on stage and in the audience that night contains contradictory evidence sorted skillfully by the author. He offers a wealth of context; in fact, his account of Dylan's stage appearance does not arrive until 250 pages in. The author cites dozens of sources, well-known and otherwise, but the key storylines, other than Dylan, involve acoustic folk music guru Pete Seeger and the rich history of the Newport festival, a history that had created expectations smashed by Dylan. Furthermore, the appearances on the pages by other musicians—e.g., Joan Baez, the Weaver, Peter, Paul, and Mary, Dave Van Ronk, and Gordon Lightfoot—give the book enough of an expansive feel. Wald's personal knowledge seems encyclopedic, and his endnotes show how he ranged far beyond personal knowledge to produce the book.
An enjoyable slice of 20th-century music journalism almost certain to provide something for most readers, no matter one’s personal feelings about Dylan's music or persona.Pub Date: July 25, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-236668-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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