A hazily rendered autobiography of the popular 1970s folk singer. Denver was born Henry John Deutschendorf, the self-conscious, withdrawn son of an uptight Air Force pilot; at 50, the singer says, he's still struggling to reach adulthood. With the help of oral historian Tobier, he describes youthful alienation in Montgomery, Ala., and Fort Worth, Tex.; early successes on the L.A. folk music scene and as the composer of ``Leaving on a Jet Plane'' for Peter, Paul, and Mary; and his peripatetic late '60s life as a singer of satirical antiwar songs with the Chad Mitchell Trio. Despite these counterculture credentials, Denver acknowledges that he's rather square—of Mick Jagger's appeal he says, ``Frankly, I just didn't get it.'' That and a certain shyness, along with a string of hits through the mid-'70s, helped make him palatable to enormous numbers of Americans and, later, the unthreatening embodiment of a progressive environmental stance. Denver's attempt to ``define his space'' has drawn him to various New Age phenomena, including Werner Erhard's EST, astrology, and Native American soul retrieval. He has sought to make constructive use of his popularity and wealth, as a member of Jimmy Carter's Commission on World Hunger and founder of Windstar, a Colorado environmental institute. Flashes of self-awareness (``Being `cute' onstage was my way of covering up a fear...of being seen as vacuous'') and clichÇs appear in equal proportion here. Despite confessions of drug use, extramarital affairs, and an angry incident with a chainsaw, the sort of detail that would lend drama to such scenes is generally lacking. Fans may get greatest satisfaction from descriptions of the circumstances that inspired hits like ``Take Me Home, Country Roads'' and ``Rocky Mountain High.'' This may resonate with Denver's still-sizable following but few others. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Nov. 2, 1994
ISBN: 0-517-59537-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1994
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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