Following several attempts at a reunion, the band died with Van Zant and three other band members in a plane crash in 1977,...
One for the fans as Odom, security manager for Lynyrd Skynyrd and longtime buddy of lead man Ronnie Van Zant, chronicles the boozy ascent and abrupt crash of the hugely popular band.
They certainly burned bright for a few years, with a “hellfire boogie played at a quickfire pace.” In this admiring biography, Odom follows the band through its early manifestations as the Noble Five and the One Percent, playing gigs off the back of a flatbed truck at church socials while adding and subtracting members. This was a bunch of gents who liked fishing, fighting, girls, and singing: rednecks and proud of it. But, Odom says, they—and Van Zant in particular—were perfectionists, rehearsing and noodling with their songs until they ultimately attracted the attention of Al Kooper, who further helped shape their sound. Sketches are afforded of each of the band members and a good number of their entourage, but it’s Van Zant who commands Odom’s affection. A talented songwriter who made the most of his limited vocal skills, Van Zant was a Jekyll-and-Hyde drinker, unpredictably violent when drunk (and drunk most of the time, as were most of the band members). Yet, despite all the drinking before the shows, the band had enormous stage presence, and their neatly choreographed performances crackled with energy. Odom bravely tries to make a case for their distinctiveness within Southern rock (including the Allman Brothers, ZZ Top, Marshall Tucker), but it was their knack for “quotation music”—carefully measured appropriations of Hendrix, Clapton, Jethro Tull, and others the band respected—that steams off the page here, second only to their gift for hellraising.
Following several attempts at a reunion, the band died with Van Zant and three other band members in a plane crash in 1977, an accident handled with tact here and easily the most disturbing and electrifying part of this tribute to Lynyrd Skynyrd. (Photographs)Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2002
ISBN: 0-7679-1026-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2002
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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