Bowen, a man who made millions of dollars, and seemingly as many enemies, with his ruthless management style (Jerry Lee Lewis purportedly wanted to kill him), describes his life in this candid, if self-aggrandizing, autobiography. Bowen is best known for his role in facilitating the recent resurgence of country music. He started his career as a bass player but quickly found greater success as a producer, working with Frank Sinatra and his ``Rat Pack.'' He displayed what was to become his signature manic drive when he created a hit for Sinatra out of ``Strangers in the Night,'' a song that had already been recorded by another singer and was about to land in stores. Bowen recorded, pressed, and delivered Sinatra's version within a nerve-wracking 24 hours, beat out the competition, and gave Sinatra's career a major mid-1960s boost. Ambition (and a perpetual yearning for new challenges) drove Bowen from one record label to another. He was almost always successful, sometimes spectacularly so. He managed six Nashville divisions—including those of Warner and MCA—in just over a decade. Whenever he took over a label, he would fire and replace much of the staff, update recording techniques (he was an early proponent of digital recording technology), and encourage artists to take responsibility for the direction and production of their music. The book provides wonderful flashes of music history throughout, including Bowen's shrewd assessments of the sprawling, frantic music business and of major rock and country singers. Country music fans will also find interest in the measured jabs aimed at Bowen's business nemesis, Garth Brooks, one of country's biggest stars. Though an unauthorized biography might be more revealing, Bowen is honest enough with his audience to scare: It's like watching a Great White from inside a shark cage—readers will be fascinated, but happy they aren't closer. (8 pages photos, not seen)
Pub Date: May 5, 1997
ISBN: 0-684-80764-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1997
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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