Latter-day heads—as well as “relentless dabblers” and the historically minded—will enjoy this well-researched, mind-altering...
A history of the interplay between hallucinogens and rock music in the innocent minds of young America.
Albert Hoffman, the inventor of LSD, felt guilty about that achievement because, among other things, he worried that getting a clear view of the universe would keep youngsters away from church, where they belonged. But when acid hit the streets of California, the kids turned to the church of rock ’n’ roll—and, more to the point, the church of the Grateful Dead, the heroes of rock journalist Jarnow’s (Big Day Coming: Yo La Tengo and the Rise of Indie Rock, 2012) book. In a time when Charlie Manson was lurking right around the corner, they were there to spread lysergic sunshine across the land. “The happy apolitical psychedelic world unfolds like a patch of greenery wherever they go,” writes the author, reveling in the historic present to describe events of a half-century ago. Manson, yes, and capitalism: hucksters always surrounded the Dead, trying to cash in on their craze and “franchise [the] very concept” of being…well, heads. Jarnow has a bloodhound’s sense of the marrow of an argument and the meat of historic fact: no one else has so clearly pointed out the path that led from Garcia’s old lady to the “delicious seedless pot” that turned smoking a joint into a gasket-blowing trip. The author is also dogged in tracing the psychedelic activism of Ken Kesey, Owsley Stanley, and company over the decades into the present, with weird and shadowy groups preaching the acid gospel. Though Jarnow is sometimes unduly celebratory and sometimes begs credulity—is the fact that we use emoji on our mobile phones really evidence that the psychedelic revolution carried the day?—his book is a lot of fun to read, and it absorbs its own weight in excess reality. And reality, he reminds us, is always a lot weirder than anything drugs can cook up.
Latter-day heads—as well as “relentless dabblers” and the historically minded—will enjoy this well-researched, mind-altering excursion.Pub Date: April 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-306-82255-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: Feb. 14, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
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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