For ardent collectors of Eltoniana only.
Straightforward biography of Sir Elton John, master of rock piano and camp performance.
Part Mona Lisa and part Mad Hatter, John astounded his parents with his child-prodigy skills at the piano at the age of 3 and, early on, took his talents and ran with them. Whether that adds up to his being “the most remarkably beloved rock and pop artist of rock history,” as Bego (Eat Like a Rock Star: More Than 100 Recipes From Rock 'n' Roll's Greatest, 2017, etc.) writes, is surely debatable. The remark is suggestive of the tossed-off way in which the author treats a subject who deserves deeper consideration. It’s inarguable that John turned his skills as a pianist and crowd-pleasing showman to materially impressive ends, earning and spending millions of dollars while working his way through trauma and “looking for love in all the wrong places.” Bego, who has authored biographies of Tina Turner, Cher, Billy Joel, and others, covers all the familiar ground: John’s lifelong musical partnership with Bernie Taupin; the dazzling costumes and improbable acrobatics onstage; the friendships with Lady Diana and, for that matter, Ru Paul; the decades of decadence; the generosity to charity; the dawning realization that his habits, as John put it, had made him “a piano-playing Elvis Presley”; and the willful recovery. An effort to tie the book to the unrelated movie Rocketman yields only the observation that Elton John can now add “cinematic hero” to his resume. Philip Norman’s Elton John (1992), albeit slightly updated in reissue, cuts off three decades ago; even so, it is by far the better book, digging deeper into John’s life and work. Bego’s book is filled with glancing chapter titles (“Glitter and Be Gay”) and painful turns of phrase (“Whatever he does, he does it one hundred and fifty percent, whether it is doing drugs, having wild parties, or alphabetizing his CD collection”). In the end, this biography is an exercise in superficiality, about as muscular as a handshake from Andy Warhol, who “would present his hand like he had just handed you a dead chicken.”
For ardent collectors of Eltoniana only.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64-313313-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2019
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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