A book that nudges a legendary legacy from the cultural margins toward the mainstream.
A critical analysis that celebrates the transgressive author as rock avatar, cultural visionary, and literary adventurer.
The terms of the title could have been flipped, for this book focuses on what might be called “the cult of William S. Burroughs” and the ways that his influence and legacy have permeated the culture of rock as a whole. Longtime music critic Rae, the director of music licensing for SiriusXM, not only makes the case that the triumvirate of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Bob Dylan were equally and deeply under the influence of the novelist, but also that his influence can be seen across the spectrum of rock, at the opposite poles of progressive and punk. Indeed, he argues that the creative forces of Led Zeppelin, the Grateful Dead, and the Clash all worshipped at Burroughs’ altar. Moreover, Burroughs anticipated the internet, where we are “bombarded with fragmentary words, sounds, and images shot through the digital ether,” his cut-up strategy with words and tape anticipated hip-hop sampling. “Once you start looking,” writes Rae, “Burroughs is everywhere. It’s like a game of ‘Where’s Waldo?’ with a killer soundtrack. But instead of a chipper youth with a striped sweater, we’re spying a wan junkie in an old fedora.” Occasionally, the author overreachs in his analysis, suggesting that Burroughs must have influenced where he may have and that his influence was crucial at pivotal moments when it was perhaps coincidental at best. Would Dylan have become Dylan in a world without Burroughs? Most likely. Yet David Bowie clearly learned much about dissociative artistry and shifting personae from Burroughs (as well as from Dylan), and Kurt Cobain plainly considered himself an acolyte. Maybe more rock stars romanticized his life and addiction than actually read his books, and some tried “to boost their own hipness through association,” but Rae builds a convincing case that Burroughs has been underacknowledged in rock history.
A book that nudges a legendary legacy from the cultural margins toward the mainstream.Pub Date: June 11, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4773-1650-4
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Univ. of Texas
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
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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