Indifferent writing and tut-tutting and shallow criticism conspire to make this of interest mostly to completist collectors.
New biography of the youngest, gloomiest Beatle.
It may come as news to some fans of the spiritually minded Harrison that, by Thomson’s (Under the Ivy: The Life and Music of Kate Bush, 2010, etc.) account, he was as sexually promiscuous as many of his fellow musicians: “He seduced one young woman days before the Concert for Bangladesh, and even made overtures to another in the wings during the concert itself.” It may come as news to others that Harrison, once pioneering in his blend of Eastern and Western musical traditions, was a sonic fuddy-duddy in his later years: “Rap stinks,” he pronounced, “and techno is humanless music coming out of computers that bring you to madness.” That seems stern for someone who introduced Moogs to Beatlemaniacs and had no qualms about setting Hare Krishna chants against pop backgrounds, but though Harrison never advertised himself as a saint, Thomson seems always surprised that Harrison was, from the earliest age, a smoker, drinker and drugger—in other words, a rock musician. The author covers his subject from cradle to grave, a span of time that has been thoroughly covered by other writers, on some of whom he relies too heavily. The result is a plethora of old news, including the well-worn observation that it was George who taught John Lennon how to tune a guitar. The writing is seldom distinguished, too often pockmarked by forced observations that the refrain of Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” “seemed to capture something of Harrison’s growing ambivalence as The Beatles dragged themselves around the United States for the second summer in a row” and that “like an alcoholic with the bottle, no Beatle was ever freed from the grip of the Fab Four.”
Indifferent writing and tut-tutting and shallow criticism conspire to make this of interest mostly to completist collectors.Pub Date: Jan. 2, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4683-1065-8
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: Nov. 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2014
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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