Despite its psychologically thin veneer, the book is a harrowing cautionary tale of the perilous freedoms that rock stardom...
Go-Go’s singer and popular solo songstress reflects on her struggles with identity, drugs and the pitfalls of pop stardom.
The author was raised by her mother in the Southern California suburbs, where she became the beneficiary of right-place-at-the-right-time serendipity while experimenting with the burgeoning late-’70s L.A. punk scene. She almost inadvertently became the cherubic lead singer for all-girl pop-punk group the Go-Go’s. Their rise to superstardom in the ’80s seemed as unexpected as it was inevitable. One minute Carlisle and her girlfriends were sitting on a curb in Hollywood talking about playing music, and the next they were the first all-female band to hit No. 1 on the Billboard charts with songs they wrote and played themselves. The author’s recollections of the years through her late-’80s period of solo success are awhirl with drug binges, drunken escapades, celebrity boyfriends, band infighting and nonstop touring. Despite the transience of her pop-star lifestyle, two constants in her life prevailed: cocaine and insecurity. The book’s familiar double-edged–sword success story takes shape early on. Once large amounts of money were at stake, suddenly egos damaged more easily and personality conflicts flared up among the Go-Go’s, leading to the group’s initial breakup in 1985. Even with her mega-successful solo career, which included hits like “Mad About You,” Carlisle was still short on self-knowledge and spiritual fulfillment. She eventually found herself in a semi-functional marriage to Morgan Mason, the wealthy scion of actor James Mason. Although readers may find it difficult to sympathize with the author’s combination of discontent and moneyed privilege, her memoir is generously confessional enough to give a compelling edge to her battle with substance abuse and her quest for spiritual balance.
Despite its psychologically thin veneer, the book is a harrowing cautionary tale of the perilous freedoms that rock stardom brings.Pub Date: June 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-307-46349-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2010
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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