Casual, chatty book that’s generally pointless, save for some vaguely interesting music-business insights that illuminate...
The would-be Alanis Morissette of her generation—Alanis Morissette beat her to it—Trynin pens the tale of fading away before getting the chance to burn out.
The school that spawned Liz Phair and Karen O is also the alma mater of Jen Trynin. Hardly a household name, but believe her, she was this close. This close is the crux of this memoir, which details the hysterical hype surrounding Trynin’s debut album, and her subsequent devastation when the public failed to believe it. Trynin, in a literary version of the movie montage, condenses her childhood and teen years into a few pages of fragments. The narrative begins when the singer-songwriter-guitarist attempts to infiltrate Boston’s club scene after emerging from the liberal-arts bubble. Years of stagnation in the “Sunday-through-Wednesday-night/folk-acoustic-chick-band-wasteland” follow, during which she falls in love with a ponytailed producer and records an EP on a short-lived jazz label. After a cycle of minor successes followed by bouts of stuffing her body with pizza and her brain with late-night television, Trynin, just before her watershed 30th birthday, decides to make one last go of musical success. After releasing an album on her own impromptu label, she is shocked to find herself at the center of the music industry’s most spotlighted bidding war in years. The whirlwind begins and the text devolves into a frantic list of names and quotes, facts and figures. Trynin plays nightly gigs, has her ear chewed off by one executive or lawyer or manager after another, gets drunk, kisses her bass player, gets drunk, signs a huge contract, gets drunk and ultimately ends up knocked out of rock-star contention by that other strong-voiced, edgy female rocker, Alanis Morissette.
Casual, chatty book that’s generally pointless, save for some vaguely interesting music-business insights that illuminate the industry’s egregious exploitation of artists.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-15-101148-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2005
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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