A rock ’n’ roll fairy tale with a sunny, but gritty, heroine.
An irresistible memoir of one of the lesser lights of a major constellation of rock stars and their satellites.
Assisted by veteran co-author Ketcham (co-author, with William Cope Moyers: Broken: My Story of Addiction and Redemption, 2006, etc.), O’Dell discusses how her friends and lovers, as the subtitle of her book makes clear, included some of the most famous people of her generation. How did this girl from Oklahoma, by way of Tucson and Los Angeles, become a member of rock’s innermost circle, a singer on the chorus of “Hey, Jude,” the inspiration for songs by Leon Russell, George Harrison and Joni Mitchell and the sometime nemesis of Eric Clapton, lover of Russell, Mick Jagger, Ringo Starr and Bob Dylan? Her ascent was due partly to her being in the right place at the right time, an intrepidness that led her to fly, at age 20, to London to look for a job at the Beatles’ Apple Records, and a talent for knowing how to give people exactly what they wanted without getting in their way. “I was adept at dealing with famous people with complicated egos,” she writes. “I wasn’t afraid of them or overawed by their stardom. I could see the person behind the cloak of fame, but—and this was key—I never, ever forgot that the cloak was there.” A fixture on the Rolling Stones’ notorious 1972 tour in support of Exile on Main Street, after a few years she was managing major tours herself—she was probably the first woman to do so—including Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue of 1975. O’Dell provides valuable inside information about the landscape of ’70s rock, but she also looks at the complicated relationships at the center of Pattie Boyd’s Wonderful Tonight (2007), a collaboration between Boyd, Harrison, Clapton and Starr and his wife. Though the chronology takes bigger jumps over the years in the later chapters, the book also chronicles the author’s triumphs over addictions to alcohol and cocaine and her safe landing as a mother and hypnotherapist/drug counselor in Tucson.
A rock ’n’ roll fairy tale with a sunny, but gritty, heroine.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4165-9093-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 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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