For completists, a necessity. Others will want to consult Hunter Davies’s The Beatles, which, though 38 years old and...
In time for the 40th anniversary of “Paperback Writer” comes this thousand-pages-give-or-take-a-few, overblown account of the already obsessively chronicled Fab Four.
The Beatles come in for some rough treatment, à la Albert Goldman, at the hands of Spitz (Shoot Out the Lights, 1995, etc.), who seems taken only with the always affable Ringo Starr. To his credit, he gets the origins of Ringo’s nickname right, something many of the 500-plus books on the Beatles haven’t managed. To his credit, too, he works with a broad range of reference materials, correcting the record at points, amplifying it at others, and here and there making news: It may surprise many readers, for one thing, to know that the Sgt. Pepper sessions were energized by cocaine, and to learn of the band’s ruthlessness in conquering the Liverpool music scene—which included stealing Ringo from a rival group. Still, Spitz stacks up demerits. Like Goldman, he seems to work from a deep dislike for John Lennon, who was, by most accounts, nowhere near as demonic as Spitz has it; the dislike deepens when Yoko Ono, self-absorbed dragon lady, comes into the picture (“she jumped into the smoky spotlight, clutching the mike with both hands and screeching into it like a wounded animal”). Of Lennon the drug-dependent bad boy, Spitz writes: “With his painfully thin frame, gaunt face, stringy, unkempt hair, and bloodshot eyes, John looked demonic, like a zombie had claimed his tormented soul.” Paul McCartney and George Harrison have it easier; they’re merely egomaniacal and spoiled. Coupled with pet peeves, a tin ear (do gargoyles caper?) and some curious notions (that, for one, Harrison professed “traditional Christianity”), this obese book seems less the “definitive biography” Spitz proclaims than another exercise in ax-grinding for profit.
For completists, a necessity. Others will want to consult Hunter Davies’s The Beatles, which, though 38 years old and problematic in itself, is a pleasure to read.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2005
ISBN: 0-316-80352-9
Page Count: 928
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2005
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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