Thoughtful, earnest reflections on family, creative integrity, and a life in music.
The frontman of Wilco on vulnerability, creativity, and taking the long cut.
Tweedy (Adult Head, 2004) would like to avoid the usual trappings of the rock memoir: stories of sexual exploits, drug use, and endless road tours. Of course, these elements are present in his memoir, just not in the manner one might expect. The author, lead singer of the American rock band Wilco and founding member of alt-country group Uncle Tupelo, actively demythologizes the rock-’n’-roll hero. Instead of painting a self-indulgent portrait of bravado, unflagging charisma, and innate musical talent, Tweedy relates tales of social awkwardness and panic attacks overcome by hard work and an encyclopedic knowledge of rock history. The author lays claim to vulnerability as his defining artistic trait, a characteristic that fuels an intense openness to emotions, musical influences, and artistic relationships. Fans will appreciate early sections recounting the search for obscure albums and the necessity of playing dilapidated venues. Tweedy also details productive yet embattled relationships with the two Jays, fellow band mates Jay Farrar and Jay Bennett. Some of the most powerful sections cover Tweedy’s lapse into, and recovery from, opioid addiction. Jettisoning the hackneyed image of the womanizing rock star, the author also recounts an anguished story about a sexual encounter with an older woman when he was 14. Taken as a whole, the memoir provides lessons in making art from a person who needed to create in order to combat loneliness and despair. At times, the writing meanders, though this could equally be described as the book’s changing tempo, as it alternates between plot-driven sections and more ruminative pieces. The introduction, moreover, is discordantly jokey. Sincerity is what bolsters this book. Tweedy writes movingly about his parents, his wife and children, and his desire to find an artistic home for his band.
Thoughtful, earnest reflections on family, creative integrity, and a life in music.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-101-98526-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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