Weakest on musical recollections and career arcs, but some overwhelmingly poignant and wrenching personal meditations make...
The celebrated rock guitarist pens an uneven yet engrossing memoir.
Clapton has enjoyed a colorful and eventful career for four decades, and he has long been among the most reticent of interview subjects, so the English axeman’s autobiography is cause for some celebration. The book will aggravate those who want to know more about the nuts and bolts of his long-lasting stardom, though he dutifully, if somewhat perfunctorily, marches through his musical history. Born illegitimate in rural Surrey and raised by his grandparents, Clapton became a blues fanatic and took up guitar as a youth. Barely in his 20s, he found immediate fame as a wizardly soloist in a succession of storied bands: the Yardbirds, John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, Cream, Blind Faith and Derek & The Dominos. The ever-hesitant Clapton still appears uneasy about delving too deeply into the dynamics of these legendary groups, though here and there he offers an amusing backstage anecdote or a penetrating glimpse of such bandmates as drummer Ginger Baker and keyboardist Steve Winwood, or contemporaries like Jimi Hendrix and John Lennon. His tale is most compelling, and his narrative voice strongest, when he writes about the vicissitudes of his romantic life and his protracted struggle with heroin addiction and alcoholism. He emotionally replays his agonizing affair and long, rocky relationship with Pattie Boyd, George Harrison’s wife when he met her, and he is bluntly honest about the years he lost to junk and drink before he finally sobered up for good 20 years ago. Clapton is also movingly candid about the accidental death of his son Conor in 1991. His account of the founding of his Antiguan drug-and-alcohol facility Crossroads powerfully affirms the guitarist’s commitment to recovery. The book peters out in its last pages, as Clapton muses on marital commitment and late-life parenthood.
Weakest on musical recollections and career arcs, but some overwhelmingly poignant and wrenching personal meditations make the book a success.Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-385-51851-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2007
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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