A light, admiring, illuminating text that will appeal to groupies, general readers, and most others in between.
A British music journalist (Guardian, Jazzwise, and others) debuts with an account of the troubled but richly musical life of the legendary drummer, composer, and lyricist—now 70—who has blended jazz, rock, and many other influences into works that both startle and entertain.
O’Dair provides a favorable view of the multitalented Wyatt, though the author does not neglect his subject’s struggles with his libido (his first marriage imploded because of it), depression, and alcohol (which began when he toured with Jimi Hendrix), a substance-abuse battle that damaged his personal relationships. Eventually, Wyatt sobered up. The majority of the book is a discussion of Wyatt’s music. O’Dair divides the book into two “sides” (like a record), and after some introductory pages about Wyatt’s boyhood (which included a family friendship with poet Robert Graves), he launches into the artist’s musical evolution. Adept on more than one instrument, Wyatt was a superb drummer, but his drumming (at least with the full kit) ended in 1973 when he went out a window at a party and suffered a spinal injury that has placed him in a wheelchair ever since. We learn lots of lush details about Wyatt’s involvement in the Soft Machine, his legendary group, in Matching Mole, and his countless appearances on the albums of others (a discography appears in the backmatter). O’Dair shows us how Wyatt was not too fond of live performances—one affecting photo shows him, microphone in hand, singing backstage while others play in the light. We also see a musician whom others were drawn to and a man who was an avowed communist, a position he dropped after Tiananmen Square and other barbarities—though he remains a committed lefty.
A light, admiring, illuminating text that will appeal to groupies, general readers, and most others in between.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-59376-616-0
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
