Not so much a pretty picture as one of high contrast, all the energy and thrall caught in Stapinski's frame.
Well-lit, cracking memoir of Lower East Side nights playing in a band.
It all starts when Stapinski (Five-Finger Discount, 2001) is interviewing Julie for a magazine assignment about working the graveyard shift. Out of the blue, Julie mentions, “I want to start a band, but I can’t find a drummer.” Stapinski’s ears nearly rotate, but she keeps her cool: “Adjusting my voice so as not to sound too eager, I muttered, as off-hand as I could, my opening line. My come-on. My pickup. ‘Well, I play drums.’ ” Thus, after a good number of labor pains, the band I Hate Jane is born, putting a spring in Stapinski’s step and a glow in her cheeks. “When I played drums,” she writes, “I knew what those surfers felt like, inside the tube, the wave breaking over them, but at the same time carrying them, faster and faster,” into the music, which, “if practiced right, could climax in a way that made your knees all noodly.” She fills the gaps in the music and vice versa. The writing has a confidential, diary-like tone as Stapinski explains what it’s like to practice until you ache and what it is like to be “in clave. The groove. The moment when it all comes together.” There are also disruptive times, when new players tip the balance, a new group is born, an ex-player is shown the door; the band morphs this way and that until it finally leaves Stapinski in the exhaust. But the real counterbalance to the merriment and light is the explosion of the author’s marriage, falling apart and coming together and falling apart and coming together to deliver an emotional tattooing that she reveals to the quick without overplaying the genuine misery of it all.
Not so much a pretty picture as one of high contrast, all the energy and thrall caught in Stapinski's frame.Pub Date: Jan. 27, 2004
ISBN: 1-4000-6014-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2003
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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