A wild rock ’n’ roll ride.
The head writer for the Onion A.V. Club goes native with Phishheads and Juggalos.
Where many writers might have picked one band to follow on tour and focused on the band itself, Rabin (The Big Rewind: A Memoir Brought to You by Pop Culture, 2009, etc.) thought it would be intriguing to cover two bands from the perspective of their fans. And what better fans to explore than the most reviled and fanatic ones in popular music, those who follow jam band Phish and those in the shadow of Detroit’s lumpen Insane Clown Posse? On the face of it, the bands and their fans seem irreconcilably different. Phish, a quartet co-founded and led by guitar god Trey Anastasio at the University of Vermont, appeals largely to middle-class kids with some college education. The duo ICP, brainchild of a ninth-grade dropout named Joseph Bruce who calls himself Violent J, appeals mainly to young, working-class males. But both bands are steeped in their unique mythologies. Along the way, Rabin ran into people who defy the stereotypes—MAs among the Juggalos and straight-edge people among the Phishheads, for example. Each group’s tours also create anarchic carnival atmospheres (ICP quite deliberately) that celebrate and create the illusion of unending childhood. But Rabin got more than he bargained for when, midtour with Phish, he had something resembling a nervous breakdown. The steady ingestion of psychotropic drugs, one accouterment both camps had in ready supply, may not have helped his mental state. Rabin’s personal misadventures, instigated by a tendency toward manic depression and irritated by paranoia over his beautiful girlfriend’s feelings for him, may seem an irrelevant distraction, but many will find that his gonzo approach to journalism makes him a spiritual kin of Hunter S. Thompson and Matt Taibbi.
A wild rock ’n’ roll ride.Pub Date: June 11, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4516-2688-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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