Shaffer’s ingratiating hepcat charm saves what could have been just another celebrity’s autobiographical ego trip.
Late Night with David Letterman veteran recalls his storybook rise from strip-club pianist to musical director of the “World’s Most Dangerous Band.”
Shaffer and co-author Ritz (Hound Dog: The Leiber & Stoller Autobiography, 2009, etc.) deliver a passionate, racy account of how the Ontario-born musician’s love for raunchy R&B piano set him on a much different path than his well-to-do lawyer father envisioned. Although Shaffer’s parents were hip partygoers, they were nevertheless products of the patriarchal Eisenhower Age. After reluctantly studying sociology in college while gigging in local bands, Shaffer came to an agreement with his father: If he wasn’t able to make a living from music within a year, then he would attend law school. Armed with a gift for improvisation and a love for cover tunes, Shaffer worked his way through Toronto dive bars and strip clubs and soon landed a gig as keyboardist for the musical Godspell in the early 1970s. His seemingly effortless rise to industry royalty follows a familiar right-place-at-the-right-time narrative. After toiling on a series of minor Broadway projects, Shaffer got a call from an old Toronto buddy, Howard Shore, the musical director for the Saturday Night Live band. Suddenly he became the hit show’s keyboardist and a resident at New York’s romantically gritty rock-star haunt, the Gramercy Hotel. Though the name-dropping comes thick and fast throughout, to his credit Shaffer never completely settles into the easy rhythms of shallow celebrity-driven anecdote. His reminisces of playing alongside the likes of Bob Dylan, Ray Charles, James Brown and other personal heroes are usually witty and reverent—although the out-of-the-blue chapter on his fascination with Jerry Lewis’s telethons is simply bizarre. As with most celebrity memoirs, the most entertaining bits of the author’s personal history are found on the road to success, not at the destination—in fact, his longtime stint at Letterman is barely mentioned.
Shaffer’s ingratiating hepcat charm saves what could have been just another celebrity’s autobiographical ego trip.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-385-52483-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
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 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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