A dishy but overstuffed and overly praiseful portrait.
A sweeping, gossipy biography of the chameleonic pop star in the form of an oral history, with input from dozens of collaborators, lovers, and admirers.
Bowie himself weighs in, too, as longtime music journalist and British GQ editor Jones (Elvis Has Left the Building: The Day the King Died, 2014, etc.) scored excellent access to Bowie and his cohort. However, Bowie’s contributions are mostly gnomic pronouncements—e.g., “my art has little to do with trends, and nothing at all to do with style.” For details (and dirt), Jones finds producers Tony Visconti and Brian Eno, who weigh in on Bowie’s approach to recording (game for anything but impatient); fashion and music journalists, who were wowed by his path-breaking 1970s performances; his first wife, Angie, who had an embattled relationship with the singer as he deeply indulged in sex and cocaine in the mid-’70s. (Deep Purple’s Glenn Hughes recalls “so many girls coming and going one by one, nonstop.”) Bowie’s musical output after the early 1980s is generally dismissed as cravenly commercial and/or lazy, but Jones’ interlocutors tend to argue even Bowie’s miscues reflect the same seeking spirit that produced “Ziggy Stardust”; he just became more interested in acting and art collecting and had settled down with his second wife, Iman. Jones unearths quirky bits of Bowie-ana (he wanted to sing a duet with Mick Jagger from a space shuttle) and details his highly creative months preceding his death from cancer in 2016. But the occupational hazard of oral histories is that they lack broader context, and a hermetically sealed, accentuate-the-positive feel intensifies in closing pages thick with encomiums—though the author does make room for critic Paul Gorman’s assessment: “he made execrable records during 1984-1995, often wore terrible clothes, stupid makeup and had rotten haircuts.” Jones captures his subject’s transformations and the responses they provoked, but the tone is fan-friendly, assuming Bowie's greatness rather than arguing for it.
A dishy but overstuffed and overly praiseful portrait.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-451-49783-3
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Crown Archetype
Review Posted Online: June 13, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017
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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