From one of rock’s most revered drummers, ruminations on motorcycling, drumming, the joys of fatherhood and the exquisite pleasure of simply enjoying the journey.
As the lyricist for Canadian progressive hard-rock trio Rush, Peart’s (Roadshow: Landscape with Drums: A Concert Tour by Motorcycle, 2007) inimitable way with words is well-known to the band’s fan base, if occasionally derided by music critics. What many may not know, however, is that the self-described “left-leaning libertarian” is equally adept at translating his philosophy into prose, as evidenced by this book, in which he continues to chronicle his unique method of getting to work—eschewing the company of his band mates in favor of motorcycling between concert venues—as a means of exploring the world around him and his place within it. Despite having experienced tremendous tragedy in recent years (including the deaths of his daughter and first wife), the author evinces such tremendous joy in discovering new off-the-beaten-paths, relishing a second chance at fatherhood, and in the simple act of learning, that it’s easy to forgive some of his more awkward attempts at humor—even those missteps tend to come off as oddly endearing, conveying a rare and unselfconscious genuineness. Perhaps the book’s best and moist poignant chapter is “The Best February Ever,” in which the author describes the bucolic setting surrounding his sanctuary in Quebec. His description of nights spent alone sipping Macallan before a roaring fire while losing himself in great books and days spent cross-country skiing over an unbroken winter landscape while focusing on simply appreciating the heart-breaking majesty of the world around him will instantly transport readers to a more relaxed state of mind—and quite possibly drive hordes of peace seekers northward. Not without potholes, but a ride well worth taking for those who seek the journey more than the destination.
Pub Date: May 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-77041-058-9
Page Count: 260
Publisher: ECW Press
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2011
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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