Though it reads like the author’s effort to write himself back into the official history of his famous sibling, this memoir...
The guitar legend’s kid brother delivers a candid memoir of the Jimi Hendrix only he knew.
Though he died in 1970 at the age of 27, leaving behind only three officially released studio albums, Hendrix remains perhaps the most influential rock guitarist ever. With the assistance of Mitchell, Hendrix’s younger brother Leon recounts their upbringing in and around Seattle in the 1950s and early ’60s, shedding light on the origins of his brother’s genius and some of his famous song lyrics. The factuality of his account may be disputed—he includes several stories that have been contradicted by others, notably that of a 1959 meeting with Little Richard in his aunt’s kitchen—but it paints a vivid portrait of growing up in that time and place, with parents struggling with a volatile relationship fueled by alcohol and gambling and trying to keep their family together. Jimi, known to the family as “Buster” after sci-fi serial star Buster Crabbe, looked to and beyond the stars from an early age, conjuring the otherworldly landscapes he would later bring to life in his music. The author was drawn more to the mean streets. As Jimi left home on the road to stardom, Leon fell into the life of a hustler, leading him to drug addiction and jail. After his brother found success, the author briefly benefited from Jimi’s excess of women, drugs and money, despite the attempts of manager Mike Jeffery (the villain here as in other Hendrix bios) to keep them apart. In the aftermath of his death, the extended family eventually splintered over control of his legacy, with father Al’s adopted daughter, Janie, winning the final court battle and leaving Leon out in the cold. The author’s recounting of this fight shows a bitterness belied by his insistence that he is “at peace”—though he seems to have gotten his life together, helped in part by learning to play the guitar given to him by his older brother.
Though it reads like the author’s effort to write himself back into the official history of his famous sibling, this memoir provides some insight into the background of a musical icon.Pub Date: May 8, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-312-66881-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2012
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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