Engaging look at the seductions of late-in-life creativity and a cleareyed account of the strange state of today’s music...
Affectionate memoir of a second-career songwriter finally making a record, alongside a cast of music-scene lifers.
Siblin (The Cello Suites: J.S. Bach, Pablo Casals, and the Search for a Baroque Masterpiece, 2011), former pop-music critic for the Montreal Gazette and recipient of the QWF Mavis Gallant Nonfiction Prize, loved playing in garage bands until “university and then journalism took over my life, while songwriting remained a hobby.” More recently, he wanted to complete these long-gestating musical projects. “For a long time songs had been percolating in me,” he writes. “But a new urgency had recently been brought to the equation.” This determination stemmed from chance encounters with musicians from his past and newly beguiling chanteuses from the blues and club circuits. The gradual development of these friendships is a thread throughout the narrative, as these new and old acquaintances update Siblin on industry upheavals and new recording technologies. Considering his options, the author writes, “a few decades into the songwriting process, I felt ready to make a truly professional recording.” His determination to capture ideal takes of a dozen songs fuels a meandering but detailed production narrative. He began at a friend’s attic studio and then graduated to the elaborate setup of a producer associated with the Arcade Fire, who warned him, “people often come in here thinking that I have some gold dust that I can sprinkle on them…but your record is going to be a reflection of you and your songs.” The producer brought a variety of professional players, who exposed the wistful Siblin to the grit and glamour of the working musician’s life. Throughout the journey, the author remained equally fascinated by the technological transformations of pop music and the emotional undercurrents of collaboration. Only occasionally does the observational prose become solipsistic.
Engaging look at the seductions of late-in-life creativity and a cleareyed account of the strange state of today’s music industry.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-77089-934-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: House of Anansi Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 24, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2017
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 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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