Wareham may not demonstrate the sharpest narrative focus, but his memoir is refreshingly confident and unsentimental in its...
Indie-rock icon recalls life in the studio and on the road.
Wareham begins with a chronicle of his childhood and early adult life. Born in New Zealand, his family moved to New York City in 1977. While attending the exclusive Dalton School, he frequented CBGB’s, Irving Plaza, the Palladium and other venues, catching performances by the Clash, the Talking Heads, the Ramones, Pere Ubu, Television and many others. In 1981, Wareham enrolled at Harvard and soon after started his first band, Speedy and the Castanets: “[We] sucked. We were clueless and talentless. And yet we felt we were the only interesting band on campus. So what if we couldn’t play? If nothing else, we had our arrogance.” Such sentiment colors most of the narrative, as the author offers frequent asides about music, philosophy and the art of performance—some enlightening, others trite, but all unflinchingly honest. On a particularly poor Bob Dylan show: “He had that dolt GE Smith on guitar. GE Smith was the bandleader on Saturday Night Live, and he was best known for making too many rock faces. Maybe his playing would be tolerable if he put a paper bag over his head.” While living in Boston in the early ’80s, guitarist and singer Wareham founded Galaxie 500 with two friends. The band toiled in the small-club scene for a few years and then gradually built a loyal fan base touring across the United States and playing a few international rock festivals, including the Glastonbury Festival in England and Roskilde in Denmark. Though Galaxie 500 eventually developed a cult following, Wareham quit in 1991 and went on to found Luna, the band for which he would become best known. After releasing Lunapark, the band embarked on their first tour, landing an opening slot for the Screaming Trees. A second album, Bewitched, followed, but it was their third album, Penthouse, on which “Luna really hit its stride musically…we had learned to appreciate the subtleties of one another’s playing.” The author provides a highly detailed, if occasionally scattershot, account of his life—including the addition of bassist Britta Phillips (“the best visible panty line in rock”), with whom the author had an affair, then eventually married—and he tosses in enough pointed musical and cultural commentary to satisfy even the most jaded rock-bio fan.
Wareham may not demonstrate the sharpest narrative focus, but his memoir is refreshingly confident and unsentimental in its exploration of life in the indie-rock trenches.Pub Date: March 17, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59420-155-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2007
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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