Brown’s passionate, über-detailed study of pop’s scariest visionary is just about as good as a music bio can get.
Shining the spotlight on one of modern music’s most shadowy—and, frankly, most nutty—figures.
Alone and adrift in his California high school, an asthmatic, 98-pound outcast named Harvey Phillip Spector decides that the way to gain popularity amongst his peers is to drop the “Harvey,” learn guitar and start a rock band called the Teddy Bears. Next thing you know, it’s 1958, and, thanks in part to the Phil Spector-penned hit “To Know Him is to Love Him,” the slender savant is a piping hot, sought-after composer and producer. Over the next four decades, Spector went on to write and/or produce dozens of classic three-minute pop symphonettes for, among others, Tina Turner (“River Deep-Mountain High”), the Ronettes (“Be My Baby”) and the Righteous Brothers (“You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling”), as well as albums for John Lennon and the Ramones. The majority of Spector’s work was immediately recognizable thanks to his use of instrumental layering, a technique that was ultimately dubbed “The Wall of Sound.” But Spector was a high-strung, paranoid train wreck who would just as soon pull a gun on you—just ask Dee Dee Ramone—as he would mix down your record—and truth be told, his personal instability is the primary reason that his life merits a 500-plus page dissection. In terms of his hit-to-miss ratio, Spector wasn’t exactly Ty Cobb—George Martin, Leiber & Stoller and Dr. Dre all arguably had better batting averages—but U.K.-based journalist Brown, a keen analyst, rightfully makes a case that Spector’s most important and influential work was unbelievably important and influential. Research-wise, Brown went above and beyond, at one point spending a fascinating, creepy day interviewing the reclusive Spector at his castle in Alhambra—an interview during which the subject wore a wig, a bathrobe and heels—and, later on, was questioned by the LAPD about Spector’s role in the murder of actress Lana Clarkson. It’s this combination of dogged reportage and music savvy that makes this one of the most compelling, memorable rock-’n’-roll biographies in recent memory.
Brown’s passionate, über-detailed study of pop’s scariest visionary is just about as good as a music bio can get.Pub Date: June 6, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-4000-4219-7
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 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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