Some fresh reporting and colorful description amid a well-known tale—fans will love it.
The whirlwind story of the rock legends.
Led Zeppelin remains more popular now than ever, writes British journalist Wall (W.A.R.: The Unauthorized Biography of William Axl Rose, 2008, etc.). Based on interviews and new research, he offers a vivid, anecdote-crammed account of the spectacular rise and dark decline of the four young rock musicians—Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, John Bonham and John Paul Jones—who created one of the all-time best bands and pushed the outer limits of sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll. Much of the story is familiar, but Wall ably captures the mix of creativity and depravity. Formed by guitarist Page, Led Zeppelin clicked immediately. Fans adored them, while critics called their hard rock/blues hybrid overhyped and too loud. The band just played louder and longer—one Boston concert lasted nearly five hours—and assumed an outsider persona (they refused to appear at Woodstock), playing trippy set pieces for hippie kids and embodying the paranoid atmosphere in America in the wake of the Charles Manson murders. As years passed, their on- and offstage antics grew, as did audiences and album sales, and Led Zeppelin moved into a “full-on, town-owning, party-head mode,” engaging in raucous behavior and debauchery fueled by rampant drug use. Amid graphic descriptions of the band’s notorious groupie moments, Wall offers thoughtful discussions of their tours, albums, and talents and peculiarities. Page, deeply interested in the occult, bought English hedonist Aleister Crowley’s infamous Scotland home; singer Plant long hankered to go solo and found success with bluegrass singer Alison Krauss in 2007; bassist Jones remained ever-sensible; and drummer Bonham, drug-addled and thuggish, died in 1980, which led to the band’s breakup. In their last years, writes Wall, the band played under a “cold, black cloud,” with U.S. fans sometimes rampaging. Now in their 60s, surviving members appear to have few regrets; they reunite occasionally, and their albums bring in millions annually.
Some fresh reporting and colorful description amid a well-known tale—fans will love it.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-312-59000-0
Page Count: 496
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2009
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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