Initially thrilling but finally artless, with little for the casual fan.
The cute Beatle may not have been quite so cuddly.
Sandford (Keith Richards, 2004, etc.) rejects the idea that among the Beatles, John Lennon was the caustic poet of depth and insight while Paul, though he may have had a knack for good tunes, was more interested in commerce than art. Sandford’s by-the-numbers bio comes up with plenty of evidence to support the idea that McCartney was much more of an innovator than generally credited: He basically invented the concept album, he was an early acolyte of John Cage and he pioneered the use of found sound, tape loops and other avant-garde standards. This insight alone, however, isn’t sufficient to justify yet another McCartney book. Starting off, rather oddly, with the musician’s 1980 bust for pot in Japan, Sandford then hops back to Liverpool in the 1930s, where Jim McCartney was a local hit as the head of a rollicking dancehall band. Jim’s son Paul quickly caught the bug, and Sandford dutifully follows the flowering of the teenager’s musical partnership with John, from the Cavern in Liverpool to the Hamburg dives, and to the whirlwind of hit singles and psychotic fans that followed. It’s all well-trammeled ground, and the author at times seems more interested in detailing Paul’s prodigious drug use and legendarily lengthy list of bedmates. Once the Beatles fall apart, Sandford maroons readers in the wasteland of pointless solo albums. Ticking off how many millions were earned with each tour, glossing over the mediocrity of McCartney’s more recent output, he builds little foundation for his conclusion that “we don’t want less of him. We want more.”
Initially thrilling but finally artless, with little for the casual fan.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-7867-1614-2
Page Count: 432
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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