There’s really nothing like this oft-rapturous work in the canon of musical memoirs.
The master musician and producer offers a typically idiosyncratic take on his life and art.
In a memorable chapter of his 2004 memoir Chronicles Volume One, Bob Dylan recounts his work on the 1989 album Oh Mercy—the collection that began his artistic rebirth—with Lanois. The gifted French Canadian guitarist and engineer has clearly taken a page from Dylan’s unusual look backward, crafting his own nonchronological and discursive autobiography. Born in Quebec, Lanois got hooked on making music and recording at an early age; by his teens, he and his brother Bob were running a studio in the family basement. The signal event of his career was hooking up with Brian Eno, the English producer-musician, whose instinctive methods had a marked impact on Lanois’ production style. The book takes a fly-on-the-wall look at many of the author’s most celebrated records—his several projects with U2, Dylan’s Oh Mercy and the Grammy-winning Time Out of Mind, Emmylou Harris’ Wrecking Ball, Willie Nelson’s Teatro and his work on the soundtrack for Billy Bob Thornton’s breakthrough film, Sling Blade. Readers will savor the unique character of the producer’s unconventional technique, which often employs setting up a jerry-rigged studio with vintage gear in an exotic locale—a New Orleans apartment building, an abandoned movie house in central California. Lanois is a gearhead who can rhapsodize about the finer points of a recording console, a rare guitar or a classic motorcycle, but he never swamps his narrative by focusing on the technical. There is plenty of colorful material about his youth: a hitchhiking trip to Florida at the height of ’60s hippiedom, or his days slaving in Canadian show bands as an accompanist to exotic dancers. Like his own flavorful recordings and his best productions for others, Lanois’ book bursts with atmosphere and feeling. He is that rare breed, a lyrical technocrat, and he emerges from the work as one of music’s most unusual and charismatic figures.
There’s really nothing like this oft-rapturous work in the canon of musical memoirs.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-86547-984-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Faber & Faber/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Aug. 13, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2010
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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