One of the best rock memoirs of recent years and a revelation for fans.
The legendary piano master tells all, and delightfully.
Reginald Dwight (b. 1947) grew up with parents who “should never have got married in the first place.” Thankfully, he found deliverance in rock ’n’ roll, in which, his father commanded, “you are not to get involved.” Get involved he did, playing with a band called Bluesology that, he admitted, was pretty much like any other British white blues band, and perhaps a little less, save for a chance pairing with Long John Baldry, “maybe the greatest 12-string guitarist the UK has ever produced.” Another chance union was with a young songwriter named Bernie Taupin, who looked out on the moors and saw the Wild West. Changing his name to Elton Hercules John to shed his former skin, the astoundingly gifted pianist threw audiences into confusion; though “Britain’s least convincing flower child,” he played sort-of-hippie music, but in boas and platforms. “I started to think more about how I looked onstage,” he writes of the period around the era-defining “Your Song,” but he also realized that smashing up a piano, as opposed to Pete Townshend’s smashing a guitar, just didn’t work. He was famous from his first record on, and then rich, and then a study in addictive personality. A highlight, or perhaps lowlight, of the narrative is when, coked to the gills, he insists that Bob Dylan shed his hobo clothes for something in his glittery wardrobe only to have George Harrison caution him, “I really think you need to go steady on the old marching powder.” Now sober, a cancer survivor, and in his 70s, Sir Elton looks back at it all with grace and good humor. One might wish only that he spent as much time revealing how he came to such things as the astonishing structure of “Tiny Dancer” as he does recounting bad hair transplants and bad behavior. Even so, his memoir is a terrific read.
One of the best rock memoirs of recent years and a revelation for fans.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-14760-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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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