Plenty of factoids and musical insight about our Piano Man, but at the end of this catty biography, Billy Joel is still The...
The book that millions of fans have pined for…sort of.
Many of singer-songwriter Joel’s most enduring tunes—“Scenes from an Italian Restaurant,” “Only the Good Die Young” and “New York State of Mind,” to name only a few—feel quite autobiographical, and it could be argued that his musical and cultural resonance stems in part from the fact that he’s led a representative American life. Raised in the ’hood by immigrant parents, he fought tooth and nail to achieve professional success, found (then lost) a trophy wife, lost (then found) his happiness and mental health. Since he hasn’t seen fit to write a memoir, this full-blown Joel-ography will fill a gap. The prolific Bego, author of books about Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson and Cher, among others, wears his love for Joel’s music on his sleeve, and his in-depth analysis of virtually every song in the musician’s canon is enthusiastic, if a bit repetitive. Unfortunately, the story is told primarily via secondhand source material and gossipy interviews with past and present bandmates; drummer Liberty DeVitto is especially bitter about some of Joel’s less-than-professional business dealings. Another negative is Bego’s jokey prose, which falls particularly short of the mark in a snotty, dismissive line about the musician’s 1970 suicide attempt. In a season of doorstop-sized rock bios (Nirvana, Joe Strummer, Iggy Pop), this falls somewhere in the middle in terms of quality: It’s readable and well-researched, but lacks depth and new information. A ten-year-old Behind the Music profile, which had the advantage of a lengthy interview with Joel himself, told fans more about what makes the man tick in one hour than they will learn here in 400-plus pages.
Plenty of factoids and musical insight about our Piano Man, but at the end of this catty biography, Billy Joel is still The Stranger.Pub Date: June 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-56025-989-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2007
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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