A flash of musical brilliance—“beautiful, haunting, disturbing”—suffocated by a life so relentlessly grim you wouldn't wish...
Music journalist Cross (Nevermind, not reviewed, etc.) treats the short, strange, unhappy life of musician Kurt Cobain with intelligence and an insider's perceptiveness.
Terrible though it was, Cobain's suicide by shotgun in 1994 would never be categorized as a surprise. As Cross explains, Cobain had a lifelong affair with the act, indifferently gabbing about it as a teenager, writing and painting pictures of it, putting it in song lyrics, making a run for it in Rome—only to have his girlfriend find him comatose and rush him to a hospital. Cross picks up Cobain's life story on day one and follows it through his dreadful youth: divorced parents, one inept and the other an alcoholic, never any physical or emotional space for him, finally living out of a cardboard box as a high-schooler. It doesn't take much for Cross to convince readers of the psychological pain that Cobain endured and why he might turn to booze, then LSD, marijuana, cough syrup, and heroin. Certainly, fame was no tonic, nor, ultimately, was his marriage to fellow musician Courtney Love, or his daughter Frances. The best, or at least most telling, material here comes from interviews with friends—Cross had access to Cobain's notebooks, but he has the good sense to appreciate that they contain a good amount of posturing—who describe a wildly creative guy who could also be a “world-class whiner,” someone who cultivated the grunge look, an anti-star who wanted to know why MTV didn't run his video more often, a nihilist who never could shake his shame and self-loathing. Too many demons were crawling around in his skull to ever let him bask in his artistry or the love of the few people who really cared about him. It’s as though Cobain's life was one long session with a particularly evil hair shirt.
A flash of musical brilliance—“beautiful, haunting, disturbing”—suffocated by a life so relentlessly grim you wouldn't wish it on a sworn enemy.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2001
ISBN: 0-7868-6505-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2001
IN THE NEWS
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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