Far from the last word on Zappa, but an interesting shot from the sidelines.
A new biography of the grungy “genius” of rock ’n’ roll returns over and over again to a few themes, all carefully documented and likely to upset the faithful.
A gregarious loner who grew up during the 1950s in the character-free towns littering the southern California desert, Frank Zappa displayed early on the odd mix of interests that would show up later in his work: doo-wop music, Hispanic pachuco culture, toilet humor, atonal avant-garde composers, and a love/hate relationship with trash culture. Pop-culture historian Miles (Jack Kerouac, 1998, etc.) is at his best when ably chronicling Zappa’s early years, especially the 1960s, when he spread his freak flag via The Mothers of Invention (which he later disbanded, having come to see his bandmates as employees instead of collaborators) and such massively outsized compositions as Freak Out! An omnivorous music lover, Zappa boasted a legion of influences, which was reflected in his prodigious output; by the ’70s, at least in this account, he seems to be releasing a double or triple album on every other page. This gives Miles plenty of material to sift through for references to things in Zappa’s life, connections to other songs, and so on. Unfortunately, as the author himself often points out, for all his universally recognized musical talent, Zappa had a simply awful sense of humor, not to mention a viciously misanthropic outlook, and was always self-destructively undercutting his compositions with pointlessly smutty lyrics, “continually rubbing his audience’s face in the dirt.” Miles is far from an all-inclusive biographer, displaying as little interest in Zappa’s personal life as the artist did himself and preferring instead to go into lengthy detail about his legendarily monastic editing and recording sessions. A portrait does emerge here, and it’s a frighteningly soulless one: against it, Miles’s occasional reminders of Zappa’s musical genius seem more like afterthoughts than genuine analysis.
Far from the last word on Zappa, but an interesting shot from the sidelines.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-8021-1783-X
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2004
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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