A fascinating addition to the growing shelf of Springsteen studies, probably best read in doses.
A career-spanning collection of interviews with The Boss.
There is little doubt that Bruce Springsteen is among the most influential and important rockers of all time. The many books about him are only a small measure of his cultural impact. However, while critical and popular opinions about Springsteen’s work may change with time, there will always be The Boss’ own words about his career. Phillips and Masur (Lincoln's Hundred Days: The Emancipation Proclamation and the War for the Union, 2012, etc.), noted Springsteen scholars in their own right, have collected this definitive volume of interviews, even transcribing rare TV and radio broadcasts. The book charts Springsteen’s evolution from a withdrawn New Jersey teen playing the local bar circuit to an international rock star. From Springsteen’s earliest interview in 1973 with the Asbury Park Evening Press, which described his demeanor as “characteristically sullen,” to discussions with major media outlets like Rolling Stone, Entertainment Weekly, and 60 Minutes, Springsteen has, above all else, maintained a consistent philosophy of music first, never allowing triviality or ego to take over. He has proved this ethos time and again during his marathon live shows, always remaining honest to the audience, never conforming “to the formula of always giving the audience what it wants.” There is much to glean from Springsteen’s insights as he talks about his unpleasant upbringing in New Jersey or how, upon seeing Elvis’ infamous waist-up performance on Ed Sullivan in his early teens, he decided to dedicate himself to music. While the collection very clearly navigates a narrative of Springsteen’s life, it is a narrative already well-known by many and one that Springsteen is content to perpetuate throughout these interviews. As Springsteen admitted to Mojo in 2006, “Trust the art, be suspicious of the artist. He’s generally untrustworthy.” There is the music, after all.
A fascinating addition to the growing shelf of Springsteen studies, probably best read in doses.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-62040-072-2
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: June 12, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2013
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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