Radiohead is important, as these things go, and Randall does a thoughtful, literate job of tracing the group’s career over...
A better-than-average biography of a better-than-average pop band.
The Oxford-based quintet Radiohead, as any musically aware 30-something will tell you, has emerged in the last few years as one of the most influential rock groups around, with their 1997 album OK Computer immediately hailed as one of the best records by an English band ever. American music journalist Randall charts Radiohead’s transformation from a twee combo called On a Friday into a technologically and musically sophisticated group whose name pays fitting homage to the 1970s art-rock group Talking Heads. Some of the band’s quirkier tunes, such as the mid-1990s alt-rock hit “Creep,” have earned considerable airplay, but generally the band isn’t much heard beyond the college-radio circuit, a fact that its members lament. They insist that all they want to do is make more or less mainstream pop music and to live normal suburban lives in their off-hours; the lads, says Randall, are bookish sorts who keep to themselves and clean up trashed hotel rooms after their more rambunctious peers have departed. (Oxford has a lively music scene, he adds, because it’s a hick town that the big acts overlook, so that the locals have to make their own music.) Randall is prone to a fan’s enthusiasm—he writes, for instance, “In a relatively short time, Radiohead has undergone a remarkable transformation from pop flavor of the month into perhaps the most important rock band working today”—but the members of the band take a more modest view of themselves. One, in fact, observes late in Randall’s narrative that the group would have to split up if they ever started to believe that they were important—they’re only pop musicians, after all.
Radiohead is important, as these things go, and Randall does a thoughtful, literate job of tracing the group’s career over the last decade.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2000
ISBN: 0-385-33393-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Delta
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2000
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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