The book’s great sadness is matched by the skill and vitality of Hersh’s writing; it will make treasured and troubled...
Glimpses of a musician’s life and death.
When the singer-songwriter Vic Chesnutt (1964-2009) committed suicide with an overdose of muscle relaxants, he left behind an acclaimed, if not widely known, body of work and a devoted following, particularly among fellow musicians. One of those musicians is Hersh (Rat Girl: A Memoir, 2010, etc.), leader of the alternative rock band Throwing Muses, who became close friends with Chesnutt and, as a solo artist, toured with him often. Her book, a combination of memoir and prose poem, is an occasionally cryptic and often oblique elegy for the man with whom she shared many hours onstage and off, touring small venues for little pay where a certain principled indie rock still thrives. Chesnutt, who was paralyzed and used a wheelchair, appears here as cantankerous, outrageous, vulgar, and brilliant; Hersh, whose devotion always triumphs over her exasperation, also emphasizes his moments of kindness and humor. Wisely, the author does not linger on the sound of his music or his two-finger guitar playing—that is best left to the recordings—but she does capture his incessant wordplay and talent for pulling perfectly formed lyrics and melodies seemingly out of the air or, more often, the conversations around him. Chesnutt’s banter—with Hersh, himself, or anyone in earshot—can be quite funny, and even when it borders on inside-joke territory, it makes the author’s account more endearing. But this is hardly a fond remembrance, as Hersh’s portrait of Chesnutt is colored by pain, frustration, and, ultimately, heartbreak. Despite the author’s best efforts, Chesnutt remains a somewhat inscrutable figure—though there is no mistaking the rareness and depth of their friendship.
The book’s great sadness is matched by the skill and vitality of Hersh’s writing; it will make treasured and troubled reading for fans of Chesnutt and the author alike.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-292-75947-3
Page Count: 198
Publisher: Univ. of Texas
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2015
PROFILES
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
PERSPECTIVES
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