Heylin’s attempt to deromanticize an icon is admirable, but the finished product comes across as sullen and lackluster.
A new biography of The Boss and his incendiary band.
For those fans who have followed Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band from their heyday in the 1970s and ’80s, this overview will undoubtedly stoke controversy. While veteran rock journalist Heylin (All the Madmen: A Journey to the Dark Side of English Rock, 2011, etc.) painstakingly resurrects a bevy of dates and details from Springsteen’s forays into the studio, it quickly becomes apparent that the author doesn’t hold the fawning view of his subject that previous biographers have displayed. Depicting Springsteen less as a proletarian humanist and more as a perfectionist workhorse who wasted countless hours committing songs to tape while disbanding and reforming the band at his whim, Heylin seems intent on puncturing an American rock myth. Indeed, the book often reads as a cautionary manual on how not to approach the recording process, with the author laying the blame on Springsteen’s obsessive-compulsive revising of songs as well as the lenient attitude of his producer and yes man, Jon Landau. The phenomenally successful Born in the USA tour paradoxically comes off as the nadir of Springsteen’s career, as intimate venues for die-hard fans gave way to stadiums for picnic-goers who came to hear only the hits. After officially breaking up the band in 1989, Springsteen recorded a series of mediocre albums, then took to the road with the E Street Band again in 1999. More successful than ever, the band is currently enjoying a second renaissance, but even that happy ending can’t dispel the aroma of tepid disapproval that this book emits.
Heylin’s attempt to deromanticize an icon is admirable, but the finished product comes across as sullen and lackluster.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-670-02662-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Nov. 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2012
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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