First-rate, firsthand account of the world’s greatest rock ’n’ roll band, and a disenchanted chronicle of its increasingly...
The epic tale of an obsessive teenager who launched a Rolling Stones fanzine and spent the next two decades capturing the band’s whirlwind metamorphosis from behind the scenes.
In 1978, 16-year-old German launched Beggars Banquet, a rock-gossip ’zine about the Stones during their New York epoch. What began as an innocent passion that sold for 25 cents per copy soon turned into a life-consuming obsession as German inched his way from the fringe into the Stones’ inner circle. Ron Wood and Keith Richards took him under their wings, and Beggars Banquet became the official magazine of the Rolling Stones fan club. Once happy reporting a mere glimpse of a band member exiting a night club, German soon dropped out of college and became a privileged fixture in the Stones’ hotel rooms and at all-night parties featuring drugs, women and ’80s decadence. In the ’90s, bean-counting sharks and promoters took over, and the Stones transmogrified from a fan-friendly rock band into slick celebrities with board meetings, bottom lines and big stage productions to promote Steel Wheels, Voodoo Lounge and other albums. Those productions were exorbitantly expensive: “It was no longer a joke to say you had to mortgage your house for Stones tickets,” writes German. Once an insider accustomed to full access, he found himself shoved to the side and forced to go through channels for interviews. At 33, still single, disillusioned and unable to adjust to the newly commercial atmosphere, he began reflecting on the sacrifices he had made. Eventually, he folded Beggars Banquet, concluding that he had dedicated his entire young-adult life to “the Stones’ vacuum.”
First-rate, firsthand account of the world’s greatest rock ’n’ roll band, and a disenchanted chronicle of its increasingly crass commercialization.Pub Date: Feb. 24, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6622-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 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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