There are many voyages here, some flashes of vision, and plenty of pretense.
The silky voiced singer looks back on his career and life.
It would be hard to improve on the author’s description of his younger self: “I live in my own rarified air. I put the ‘e’ in ‘artist’ every day.” There have been few popular music memoirs with more literary references and less of a sense of self-deprecating humor. Though Garfunkel (Still Water: Prose Poems, 1989) knows that he is generally dismissed as the secondary partner to songwriter Paul Simon—“I was a ‘BOUNCE,’ a sort of wall / and he of course had the ball”—this singular mixture of verse, doggerel, blog and diary entries, soul-baring confession, and lists of hundreds of books read is less about setting the record straight on Simon and Garfunkel than allowing readers to gaze into the poetic soul of an artist who variously sees himself as Don Quixote, James Joyce, Rimbaud, Odysseus, Whitman, and Prometheus. “I have these vocal cords. Two,” he writes. “They have vibrated with the love of sound since I was five and began to sing with the sense of God’s gift running through me.” Simon may have written the songs, but Garfunkel had the voice, the hair, and the looks, and he got the girls. But all things must pass. “Does anyone notice the faint aroma of slowly decaying flesh?” he asks. “I’m depressed. All is vanity. Where is meaning?” Much of the book is about the joy he has found as a husband and a father, and some of it is about his acting career, which established him as a presence apart from Simon. “Before there was Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, there was Simon and Garfunkel—an extraordinary, a singular love affair,” he writes, though the relationship is as ambivalent as it is symbiotic. Now, many decades on, “I am an old boatman / I cast my net of pretense before me / Then I sail into it.”
There are many voyages here, some flashes of vision, and plenty of pretense.Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-35247-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
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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