A compelling look back at the rock ’n’ roll era, and a cautionary tale for today’s pop-star wannabes. (50 b&w photos)
A rueful memoir by the uniquely British blues stylist Burdon, a Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Famer, depicting his chaotic 35+-year career.
The forthright Burdon first notes that his youthful combo was “fucked from the get-go,” unprepared for the “vampires of the music business.” Still, his early years with the original Animals are recalled with a romantic shine. Forming within the heady, early-1960s British blues cult that arose in unlikely locales like working-class Newcastle, influenced by early tours with Gene Vincent, John Lee Hooker, Chuck Berry, and Jerry Lee Lewis, and fueled by drugs and internal competitiveness, the Animals hit the top of the charts in 1964 with “House of the Rising Sun.” Foolishly, however, the band assigned the rights to a single member, who together with the thuggish management withheld most of the profits. Such incidents divided the Animals and dogged Burdon’s career. His music was bootlegged; he fought with and eventually picketed MGM Records; and he got mixed up in a scuttled film starring his friend Jimi Hendrix, whose last days are portrayed in jarring detail. But he remains proud of his most prescient moves, from his early psychedelic performance with the New Animals at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival to his appearance as the first Western rocker to perform in Russia to his continuing passion for racial justice. Though his libertarian attitudes toward the era’s recreational sex and drugs make him appear an unreconstructed Boomer-rocker archetype, many stories strike humorous or poignant notes, as when a refugee from the Bosnian conflict tells him that his music “was the best thing for escape from dying and crying.” This theme of haunted survival (e.g., in the Animals’ most enduring song, “We Gotta Get Out of This Place”) epitomizes Burdon’s life as it emerges here.
A compelling look back at the rock ’n’ roll era, and a cautionary tale for today’s pop-star wannabes. (50 b&w photos)Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-56025-330-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2001
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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