An honest personal portrait but also one where the author could have revealed more—and written less.
Amiable and informative, if not always compelling, memoir by the folkie who anchored Jefferson Airplane.
As guitarist for Airplane, Kaukonen once wrote a memorable acoustic instrumental named “Embryonic Journey.” That could well serve as a title for this debut, the septuagenarian rocker’s therapeutic account of his inner and outer life and times. The son of a State Department attaché, Kaukonen’s formative years were spent traveling around the world. Along the way, he became an obsessive finger-picking guitarist and, luckily, wound up back on the family’s California home turf at a time when legendary bands were formed at a moment’s notice. Such was the case with the Airplane, which reaped a hefty advance from the beginning and created a new and defiantly trippy sound. “All of a sudden,” he writes, “psychedelic was no longer a door to perception or an excuse to party…it was becoming a genre!” As the money rolled in, so did amphetamines (among many other pharmaceuticals) and more music. “I am convinced that many of the crystalline solos on those Airplane recordings were directly related to that little orange pill,” writes the author. “It’s funny to think that my life could have been so completely ruled by mood-altering substances, but at the time it would never have occurred to me that there might be another way to live.” Kaukonen spares little in describing the winding path of his life, both the ups (writing and playing music) and the downs (addiction and a destructive codependent marriage). Unfortunately, his philosophical and spiritual ramblings become increasingly repetitive and tedious. Also, while he offers factual details about life inside the Airplane (and follow-up band Hot Tuna), he is short on offering the kind of interesting personal details only he would know—e.g, what was/is lead singer Grace Slick really like? Was he affected by the controversies swirling around the provocative “Volunteers” album?
An honest personal portrait but also one where the author could have revealed more—and written less.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-12548-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
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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