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
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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