A sensitive portrait of a sly, charming, complicated man.
Singer, songwriter, and poet Leonard Cohen (1934-2016) wanted to be remembered above all as a good father.
In an affectionate, closely observed memoir, novelist, screenwriter, and film producer Lerner (Pinkerton’s Secret, 2008, etc.) recounts a friendship that began in 1977 and lasted until Cohen’s death. At the time they met, Cohen “was already intent on keeping his private life as far removed from the limelight of his career as possible.” In fact, his career was not flourishing: He wanted to be acclaimed as a serious poet or literary novelist but instead performed as a singer to support himself, his ex-wife, and two children. Lerner describes Cohen as “an ethereal being” whose “vital energy resided above his shoulders.” The men shared a two-family house for many years, and despite decades of difference in their ages, became confidants. “Somehow,” Lerner writes, “he determined that I could understand him without explanation.” And Lerner felt equally understood: “he knew I was heading into the same difficult waters he was treading, fighting the riptide and the undertow.” Those difficult waters included professional obstacles (Cohen “tried to hold his life together with chewing gum and Scotch tape”), disappointments in love, and a deep spiritual quest. They both sought guidance from Japanese-born Rinzai Zen master Joshu Sasaki Roshi, engaging in ritualized practices and periods of meditation known as sesshin. A shared desire to understand their true natures, plumb the depths of their souls, and find enlightenment recurred in their ongoing conversations, which Lerner presents verbatim. They also discussed Cohen’s frustrated efforts to further his career; only after his manager embezzled all his money did he launch a tour that met with wild enthusiasm. More than performing, though, Lerner says that for Cohen, fatherhood “defined his life.” When he was with his children (who lived mostly with their mother), he didn’t try “to entertain, amuse, or distract” but instead “to enchant. That’s the kind of father Leonard was.” More than once, he told Lerner “on his gravestone they should just put: Father.”
A sensitive portrait of a sly, charming, complicated man.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-306-90270-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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