Occasional nuggets of revelation amid a whole lot of dross.
A memoir from the co-founder of Rhino Records.
Readers may find it hard to understand the purpose of this book or some of the editorial decisions that went into it. Bronson (The Rhino Records Story, 2013) is clearly a passionate rock fan and a veteran music journalist who has made a significant contribution to the musical archives through Rhino. Having told the story of the label that set high standards for packaging and annotation in his previous book, the author mentions Rhino only in passing as he recounts his encounters and impressions at the time with some of his favorite British Invasion groups. There are individual chapters on Herman’s Hermits, Manfred Mann, the Hollies, and others, based on interviews he conducted at the time. There is also more than anyone would want to know about Bronson’s college dating life (“Susan and I saw a lot of each other. After dates we would make out in my car”), his band and its songs, and his trips to England in the 1970s, when “I was well aware that I’d missed the zenith of British rock culture.” The first chapter is the longest, a month-by-month recounting of his senior year at UCLA. Bronson was serving as a campus representative for CBS Records, writing reviews for his college paper (and occasionally designing ads for album releases), promoting shows, and trying to promote his band, Mogan David and His Winos. “I thought Dylan had an unappealing, whiney voice, and I wasn’t interested,” writes the author—though, he admits, “along with Bob Dylan, the lyrics of The Moody Blues and Procol Harum sparked my interest in poetry.” At the end of the year, Bronson hoped to work for a label and targeted publicity as his best chance: “As I visited the publicists on a regular basis, I felt like they were my friends, but none helped me get a job.”
Occasional nuggets of revelation amid a whole lot of dross.Pub Date: April 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-945572-09-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Rare Bird Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
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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