An earnest account of a friendship featuring anecdotes of celebrity encounters.
In an episodic debut memoir, Kemp, with Friedman (Cowboy Logic, 2006, etc.), recalls his lifelong friendship with a world-famous musician.
In 1953, when he was 11, Kemp went to summer camp in northern Wisconsin and met Bobby Zimmerman, a confident 12-year-old who carried a guitar around and told everyone he would grow up to be a rock star. Zimmerman, of course, later changed his name to Bob Dylan, left his Midwestern roots behind, and found fame and fortune in New York City. Kemp poses the book’s driving question early on: “What happens when your closest friend from childhood becomes one of the most famous people in the world, seemingly overnight?” The book’s answer: Keep him close. As Kemp colorfully details, their bond was never over music but shared memories of youth and the easy affection of childhood friendship. Thanks to “Bobby,” Kemp rubs elbows with celebrities. As such, the book offers numerous cameos, as when Kemp visited Dylan on the Mexico set of the Sam Peckinipah–directed film Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, met musician/actor Kris Kristofferson, and went on a road trip through the country with actor Harry Dean Stanton. Overall, this book offers readers a remarkable look at the nature and meaning of a friendship that lasts through the years, and, throughout, Kemp tells of how he admires and cherishes Dylan’s talent without coveting it. Still, he can’t help comparing himself to his friend: “Bobby had become Bob and had started changing the world,” the author writes. “I had built up a very successful fish business. Not bad for two small town dropouts!” That said, the author does seem overeager to establish bona fides with name-dropping at times; at Dylan’s shows and on tours, including the 1975-1976 Rolling Thunder Revue, which he produced, Kemp tells of meeting Cher, Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez, and other dignitaries of 20th-century popular music. The tone of Kemp’s writing is nostalgic and warm, if mostly reportorial; fortunately, this strategy works well for the material, and the presence of Dylan, a vital and enigmatic figure, gives the book a charge that the prose itself sometimes lacks.
An earnest account of a friendship featuring anecdotes of celebrity encounters.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-73300-121-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Westrose Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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