Hard on the heels of Kinks singer/songwriter/megalomaniac Ray Davies's own memoir, X-Ray (1996), here is the autobiography of the other battling Davies brother, the one who is not widely considered to be a genius. Dave's is a straightforward, clumsily jovial memoir bursting with tales of drunkenness and cruelty. The Davies brothers grew up in working-class London and dedicated themselves to music at a young age; guitarist Dave was only 17 in 1964, when ``You Really Got Me'' suddenly made the Kinks stars. As Dave tells it, while he and the rest of the band popped pills, drank themselves blind, and had sex with everyone (boys as well as girls, Dave cheerfully reveals), Ray brooded and watched his money. Dave says Ray denied him songwriting credit for his contributions to many Kinks songs; more generally, Ray is ``abusive . . . cruel and creatively draining . . . venomous, spiteful, and completely self-involved.'' One is left thinking that only Dave's forbearance has allowed the band to survive for so long. The Kinks have endured many creatively and commercially fallow periods, and the author suffered from depressions so severe that tours were cancelled. In 1982, though, he had a cosmic awakening, consisting of a visitation by five ``intelligences'' who gave him ``irrefutable knowledge of the `Etheric Planes.' '' The author's apparently unedited prose is more serviceable describing hotel-room trashings than when laying out his newfound spiritual system. With artless honesty, he discusses his favorite songs, touring adventures, spiky interactions with band members and management, and a complicated but fulfilling family life (two long-term relationships, both producing several children, which overlapped for a few distressing years). A far less ambitious but ultimately more satisfying account of Kinkdom than the colder, more evasive X- Ray. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Feb. 20, 1997
ISBN: 0-7868-6149-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1996
SEEN & HEARD
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
PERSPECTIVES
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