``Tedious'' is a better adjective than ``lost'' for the various documents Fab Four biographer Giuliano (Blackbird: The Life and Times of Paul McCartney, 1991, etc.) has gathered here. Interviews of the group by British reporters get the book off to a slow, repetitive start as the Beatles slough off questions about the their growing fame and their music with wisecracks (Question: ``Do you go to the barber at all?'' Paul: ``It's really only our eyebrows that are growing upwards''). From there, the pieces—which include press releases and news accounts along with actual interviews—require a fairly complete knowledge of the group's history for full comprehension. In the interviews, George, Ringo, John, and Paul come across as who they were: megacelebrities who cherished their privacy, masterfully avoiding unguarded moments during dreaded but necessary promotional gigs. By the end, most of the other major, recognizable players who are interviewed (George Martin, spouses, Ravi Shankar, various gurus) give way to studio technicians and obscure relatives, like Paul's half-sister, whom he barely knew. And what enlightenment is supposed to ensue from a transcript of a press conference in which movie producer George and actress Madonna promote the disastrous Shanghai Surprise is difficult to tell. To be sure, there are some nice moments (fairly complete documentation of John's controversial remark that the Beatles were bigger than Jesus Christ, a long interview with Yoko Ono after John's death), but they are hardly worth waiting for. Giuliano obviously has a mountain of material and, as evidenced by his earlier biographies, the knowledge to write a book that would separate the wheat from the chaff for his readers. In this case, he should have done so.
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-525-93818-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1994
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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