Those who are already fans will appreciate the few revelations here.
An eclectic Los Angeles rock band of the 1970s that deserved a much larger following isn’t likely to reach one through this serviceable biography.
The first book ever about Little Feat leaves little doubt that this was a singular band—hailed by the likes of Jimmy Buffett, Bonnie Raitt and even the Rolling Stones as arguably the best ever. Yet the biographical minutiae and recording details gathered here fail to capture the magic that would elevate a band whose members didn’t get along into a unit that was so much more than the sum of the parts. To be fair to veteran rock journalist Fong-Torres (Eagles: Taking It to the Limit, 2011, etc.), there are a number of challenges facing anyone trying to tell this story: memories blurred by drugs and time, differing perspectives, the creative relationship of the rest of the band to its talented, tormented frontman, Lowell George. “The story of Little Feat is the story of Lowell George—that’s not in debate,” writes the author. “But it is also the story of the other guys who made up the original quartet and who, from the beginning, helped create the music and set the tone of Little Feat.” It’s actually as much the story of those who joined the band after that original quartet (only one of whom is still making music), pushing the band’s music away from its native LA and more toward the great American South (particularly New Orleans). But the book is mainly about George, who could be both charming and duplicitous, genius and difficult, and who had either quit the band or was fired when he died (under somewhat mysterious circumstances) in 1979 at age 34. The band eventually soldiered on for longer without George than the tumultuous decade with him, but his death let the air out of the tires—in both the band’s career and this book.
Those who are already fans will appreciate the few revelations here.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-306-82131-8
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: Sept. 22, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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
PERSPECTIVES
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