Written with the same cool passion she brings to her lyrics, Gordon delivers a generous look at life inside the punk...
The blonde enigma from the band that spoke softly and carried a big noise tells her story, from art-chick beginnings to success to marital and musical catastrophe.
Sonic Youth fans were stunned when married co-founders Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon announced in 2011 that couple and band were no more; for 30 years, both seemed impervious to the usual marital strains. Gordon, who lost Moore to another woman, took it even harder, and the bitterness is there on the first page of this autobiography, her therapeutic self-assessment as an artist struggling to define herself in a male-dominated environment. Gordon scrutinizes herself as the daughter of a distant father and a mother who had sacrificed her ambitions and also as the masochistic sister of a cruel (and schizophrenic) older brother. It’s a history she carried with her when she headed from California to the No Wave underground of New York in 1980, where she met Moore, the lanky, punk-obsessed guitarist and soul mate who was already worshipping at the altar of CBGBs. Eventually, Gordon found herself submitting to his dominating personality. “The codependent woman, the narcissistic man: stale words lifted from therapy that I nonetheless think about a lot these days.” Of course, she also thrived—as a musician, visual artist, mother and icon. Gordon goes into intriguing detail on specific songs and doesn’t hold back on Moore or other figures, even ones with worse disasters than her own: “Courtney [Love] told me she thought Kurt Cobain was hot, which made me cringe inside and hope the two of them would never meet. We all said to ourselves, ‘Uh-oh train wreck coming.’ ”
Written with the same cool passion she brings to her lyrics, Gordon delivers a generous look at life inside the punk whirlwind.Pub Date: Feb. 24, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-229589-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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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