A bravura rock memoir vibrating with fierce and fearless memories—a must-have item for Chris and Cosey and Throbbing Gristle...
The female half of the alternative music group Chris and Cosey reveals the “harsh and definitely not rose-tinted view of my past.”
Drawing on her library of diaries, musician and performance artist Tutti’s autobiography is an apt reflection of her daring, lifelong restlessness and creative ambition. Born in 1951 in Kingston upon Hull, known during post–World War II Europe as the “most violent city in England,” Tutti was raised in a strict household, and her mother’s singing voice and father’s penchant for electronics “fed and formed my notions of music and sound.” As her mischievous nature emerged, so did the 1960s counterculture in music, art, TV, and other areas. The author went on to co-found the COUM Transmissions art collective and broadened their productions to incorporate prop and dance elements that expanded into controversial commissioned installations on sex and prostitution, including an esteemed exhibition for the British Council. Tutti’s experiences in the stripping and pornography industries inspire pages of brazen, provocative anecdotes that fans will devour. All of these experiments in expression led the author to a passionate coupling with fellow artist Chris Carter and the development of the bands Throbbing Gristle in the 1970s and then Chris and Cosey in the artistic bacchanal of the 1980s. All of these historic events are lavishly and painstakingly detailed, much like the intriguingly written diaries they are culled from. Tutti clearly takes great delight in sharing the roller-coaster emotions experienced within each era and how particular watershed moments shaped her as an artist and an independent woman. Most impressive is the author’s reflection on the decisions that defined her and her personal and professional relationship with Carter that, to this day, has managed to survive culture shifts, age, health scares, and the evolutions of both the music industry and their fan base. Without a hint of regret, Tutti bares all in the name of art and personal integrity.
A bravura rock memoir vibrating with fierce and fearless memories—a must-have item for Chris and Cosey and Throbbing Gristle fans.Pub Date: May 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-571-32851-2
Page Count: 500
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017
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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