Informative and opinionated—a treasure trove for fans of rock music.
A revealing, accessible career overview of two of rock ’n’ roll’s primary architects.
With conversational prose as rhythmic as the music and language in their well-known compositions, Leiber and Stoller continue their creative partnership in this collaborative autobiography. The songwriting giants behind hits like “Hound Dog” “Poison Ivy,” “Yakety Yak” and “Love Potion No. 9” trade remembrances and anecdotes in a call-and-response reflection on their professional and, to a lesser extent, personal lives. Born in Baltimore and Queens, N.Y., respectively, Leiber and Stoller discovered an abiding love for black rhythm-and-blues music as youngsters. Stoller learned structure from legendary pianist James P. Johnson, and Leiber absorbed the street language of the Puerto Rican and African-American kids on his block. The pair met in Los Angeles in 1950 and sold their first song as teenagers. Soon they were writing hits for the Drifters, the Coasters and Ben E. King, among others. In 1952 they penned the multimillion-selling “Hound Dog,” originally recorded by Big Mama Thornton and then popularized by Elvis. Yet the book makes it clear that Leiber and Stoller were never great businessmen. In fact, they don’t seem to mind that they were bilked out of $18,000 by the notoriously crooked Jerry Wexler of Atlantic Records. The authors also recount forgettable experiences with the likes of Colonel Tom Parker and a young, arrogant Phil Spector. As the nature of the industry changed in the mid-’60s, Leiber and Stoller’s attempts to adapt to the new musical climate met with limited success. They reluctantly pay lip service to the world-changing onslaught of Beatlemania—the Fab Four weren’t “funky” enough for Leiber—but they never hit upon why their currency was waning: The biggest rock acts of the day—Dylan, the Beatles and the Stones, to name a few—were self-sufficient hit makers. The reign of the Leiber-and-Stoller–style Brill Building songwriter was all but over by the late ’60s.
Informative and opinionated—a treasure trove for fans of rock music.Pub Date: June 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4165-5938-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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