A tour of the contemporary pop music industry with one of America's most promising new bands, whose three members happen to be women. A nail-spitting punk trio of potential long-term influence that reserves the right to be both attractive and assertive, Babes in Toyland is one of the first all-female rock groups to earn widespread renown. Former Rolling Stone editor Karlen documents the Babes' pursuit of both fame and punk rigor; their long nights on the road; their difficulties with record execs, hangers-on, and one another. He also peeks into the world of enigmatic A&R man Tim Carr, who brought the Babes to Warner Music, then struggled to win them attention with a minuscule ad budget in a climate in which MTV's Beavis and Butt-head are the ultimate arbiters of cool. Karlen is sometimes more interested in his subjects' reputation than in their talent, so the content of their music gets scant attention; almost no lyrics are offered, despite the author's assertion that lead singer Kat Bjelland is a poet. But he's lucky- -the three Babes are intriguing women: Lori Barbero, the first female drummer embraced by rock's mostly male establishment; the orphaned, waifish Bjelland, whose performances resemble primal therapy; and Michelle Leon, a brainy 19-year-old whose boyfriend's murder, recounted here, causes her to leave the band. All three (and Maureen Herman, Leon's replacement) are role models for a new generation of female musicians intent on making a place for women in rock 'n' roll. Karlen's hyper-rhetoric sometimes intrudes, but he isn't oblivious to the ironies in Warner's effort to sell the Babes without sacrificing their street credibility. Recommended for moms and dads whose daughters want to grow up to be rock musicians—and (of course) their rockin' daughters. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-8129-2058-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Times/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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