Few first-person memoirs of the rock biz are as smart, honest, and entertaining as this tart, incisive work.
The drummer for a well-known Minneapolis rock band looks back on the group’s oft-bumpy ride from semi-obscurity to success and back again.
Anyone who thinks the rock-’n’-roll comedy This Is Spinal Tap is wholly fiction is directed to this wised-up, dryly funny, and sobering account of one rock group’s rise and fall. Harvard-educated percussionist Slichter offers a wry and sharply realized account of the brainy pop trio Semisonic’s eight-year slog through the music business. With sometimes wide and always wide-open eyes, Slichter recalls his sudden move into music’s big leagues in a group that also featured singer-songwriter-guitarist Dan Wilson and bassist John Munson, veterans of the onetime A&M Records act Trip Shakespeare. The relatively inexperienced skinman takes in the group’s early, sharp shocks—its signing to Elektra Records; its abrupt departure from the label after an executive regime change; and the acquisition of its album by MCA Records, the notoriously maladroit (and now defunct) major known as the “Music Cemetery of America.” He recounts the threesome’s dizzying and costly luge ride through a flop debut album and a massive smash (the ubiquitous 1998 single “Closing Time”), and their enervating failure to connect with a follow-up hit. Along the way, he observes the soul-killing rituals of the record business: fatiguing flesh-pressing with radio station staffers; uneasy appearances on TV and radio shows; expensive, nerve-racking video and photo shoots; countless unsettling encounters with clueless, arrogant label executives; and, of course, the numbing grind of touring in a succession of mammoth, faceless arenas. Books that purportedly expose the music industry’s mechanics from the inside are plentiful, but Slichter’s is one of the few that captures with precision the vertiginous highs and abysmal lows experienced during the climb up the pop ladder and the plummet from the top. He’s a self-effacing, good-humored, and intelligent guide through the musical maze.
Few first-person memoirs of the rock biz are as smart, honest, and entertaining as this tart, incisive work.Pub Date: June 29, 2004
ISBN: 0-7679-1470-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2004
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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