Unrevealing bio of the lead singer of the Rolling Stones. Though he dutifully gives us Jagger's story from its narrow middle-class beginnings onward, Seay (Stairway to Heaven, 1986) fails to get close to his subject or to develop a convincing thesis about Jagger's character. Moreover, he writes superficially (``Stardom was about to change [Jagger's] life forever, but his essential character, stripped of his charisma, would remain unchanged'') and with mistakes (Seay hails ``The Last Time'' as the Stones' first truly authentic tune when it's clearly derived from the Staple Singers' song of the same name). Quotes from Jagger- -culled mostly from other sources—often fail to enlighten, though they tend to confirm some critics' contention that he's vacuous. Wading through the moral mine field the Stones represent, Seay vacillates between griping at the group's mores and worshipping their music—especially the energetic versions of classic blues the band cut its teeth on. Meanwhile, he seems to find Bianca Jagger's gold-digging and revealing blouses as reprehensible as the Stones' most overinflated excesses (which at places like Altamont resulted in misery and even death). Seay's chronicle momentarily catches fire, though, in describing the mayhem of early Stones shows; in touching upon the late Brian Jones's contributions to the Stones' music (cf. Laura Jackson's Golden Stone, reviewed above); and in an extended riff about the way the group's youthful audience embraced the song ``Satisfaction.'' Otherwise, even as it hints at Jagger's bisexuality or notes his eagerness to join Britain's upper crust, Seay's very linear narrative rarely pauses for the kind of sustained analysis that might reveal the pop star to readers. You won't get no satisfaction here. (Sixteen pages of photographs—not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1993
ISBN: 1-55972-192-8
Page Count: 310
Publisher: Birch Lane Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1993
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
PERSPECTIVES
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