A must-read for Moby followers and surely a cathartic and revelatory writing experience for the author.
The bittersweet continuing saga of Moby’s life and career in music.
Resuming where his debut memoir, Porcelain (2016), left off, the author chronicles his days following the 1999 debut of “Play,” an album he recorded in his cramped Manhattan loft that the defeated musician considered a “flawed and poorly mixed swan song.” His career progressed despite an album tour clouded by addictive indulgences, but it was enlivened by encounters with Natalie Portman, Richard Branson, Mick Jagger, Lou Reed, Laurie Anderson, and Madonna. Folded into a narrative that frequently dips back to a childhood forever altered by his father’s suicide is the saga of an often melancholic, pensive, lonely man eager for human connection and commercial success. Moby offers moving tales of his “bucolic incarceration” at summer camp, losing his virginity, and the joys of learning the guitar, forming his own band, and DJ-ing in the 1980s. As his fame grew and subsequent albums flourished, so did his desire to release himself from the anxieties of stardom and from the grips of a music industry in which feeling worthless could become all-consuming. At one point, he writes, “I laid down…sobbing and apologizing to God and my dead mom for being such a disappointment.” Though dalliances with women, booze, and drugs, however soul-destroying, tempered his inner malaise, Moby writes of continually fooling himself with the “basic math” of a life equation that never added up to true contentment: “If you added wealth and fame and awards and sex and alcohol, that had to guarantee I would never again be a sad, scared boy from the suburbs.” The narrative plays out with the same episodic flow and emotional turbulence as Porcelain, and fans of the musician will feel his palpable sorrow in his moments of self-pitying misery. But they will also acknowledge his pride and elation when, after years of abusing alcohol to numb his psychic pain, the author fully embraced a substance abuse recovery program to heal inside and out.
A must-read for Moby followers and surely a cathartic and revelatory writing experience for the author.Pub Date: May 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-571-34889-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Review Posted Online: Feb. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
