A soulless corporate birthday party that sheds no new light on its well-traveled subjects.
At the half-century mark, the “World’s Greatest Rock ’n’ Roll Band” unambitiously recounts its own story in pictures.
A commemorative project devoted to 50 years of the Rolling Stones faces some immediate problems, since the band, in emulation of the Beatles’ great multimedia success with Anthology, already took a look backward in According to the Rolling Stones (2003). That previous authorized work surveyed the Stones’ lives and careers with a minimum of candor and a wealth of illustrations. The present anniversary-year tome is a straight-up-the-middle picture book. After four short introductory essays by founding members Jagger, Richards and Watts, and longtime guitarist Wood, the collection becomes a photographic march down Memory Lane. Many of the shots will be familiar to Stones fans and to owners of the earlier book (and former bassist Bill Wyman’s colorful history, Rolling With the Stones); some of the short quotes that accompany the stills have been lifted directly from the 2003 work. With so little context supplied by the authors or their editors, readers are on their own. Anyone with knowledge of the group’s history or mythos will wind up filling in the blanks: “Say, isn’t that Mick’s ex-wife Bianca there? Is that saxophonist Bobby Keys?” Since the focus is almost exclusively on the band’s onstage life, the book works best as a pictorial reflection of the Stones’ status as a touring attraction of nearly unequaled massiveness. Ultimately, the book is little more than a visual keepsake for obsessive fans, some of whom will already own the revealing high-end picture books by such gifted Stones shutter men as Dominique Tarlé and Ethan Russell. As histories go, the book takes a distant back seat to such essential books as Richards’ bestselling Life (2010) and Stanley Booth’s still-revelatory work of fly-on-the-wall reporting, The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones (1985).
A soulless corporate birthday party that sheds no new light on its well-traveled subjects.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4013-2473-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
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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