An enlightening if imperfectly conceived look at Bowie’s eclectic bookshelf.
A peek into the psyche of one of rock’s most inscrutable figures through the books that had the strongest impact on him.
In 2013, London’s Victoria & Albert Museum hosted an exhibition, “David Bowie Is,” for which the star drafted a list of the 100 books that had influenced him. O’Connell, a veteran music journalist, gamely delivers brief essays on each title, with context on what influence Bowie might have drawn from them. This is sometimes a tall order. Many of Bowie’s selections speak to his obvious passion for music, especially early rock ’n’ roll and R&B (Greil Marcus, Gerri Hershey), his famous Japanophilia (Yukio Mishima, Tadanori Yokoo), and his stint in Germany (Alfred Döblin, Otto Friedrich). There are a few surprising anecdotes—e.g., Alberto Denti di Pirajno’s obscure 1956 memoir, A Grave for a Dolphin directly inspired Bowie’s classic song “Heroes.” But many of Bowie’s selections don’t lend themselves to such cause-and-effect treatment. The best O’Connell can make of Bowie’s affection for Frank Norris’ McTeague and William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying is that teeth feature prominently and Bowie had dental implants; he can only speculate that Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard appealed for its story of a giant in decline. That straining for meaning suggests that this project might better have been approached thematically rather than book by book. Exploring Bowie’s interest in transgressive literature by Hubert Selby, Mikhail Bulgakov, Jack Kerouac, and John Rechy needn’t require extensive plot summaries of each novel; numerous books on divided selves speak collectively to Bowie’s career-long shape-shifting (and his late schizophrenic half brother). Still, O’Connell’s approach does underscore the range and playfulness in Bowie’s reading, from hefty tomes on the Russian Revolution to laddish comic books like The Beano.
An enlightening if imperfectly conceived look at Bowie’s eclectic bookshelf.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-982112-54-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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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