For metal heads and most fans of hard rock.
First half of a projected two-part biography of the metal masters of the universe.
Former Kerrang! editor Brannigan (This Is a Call: The Life and Times of Dave Grohl, 2010) and U.K. rock journalist Winwood dreamed up this ambitious undertaking over pints in a London pub. Both Brits had covered Metallica for years, and clearly, both held the megaband in the highest regard. This volume covers the hardworking, hard-drinking, hard-driving band’s first decade, from its founding in Los Angeles by drummer Lars Ulrich and rhythm guitarist/vocalist James Hetfield in 1981 to the preview of its game-changing fifth album at Madison Square Garden in 1991. (Among the 10,000 fans lined up to hear the album were "members of that summer's other most celebrated band: Nirvana.") True to its title, this biography also follows each significant member—including founding lead guitarist Dave Mustaine and the man who replaced him, Kirk Hammett—from birth through school, life in Metallica and, in the case of bassist Cliff Burton, shockingly premature death in a tour bus accident in 1986. Though a devastating personal and professional loss for his colleagues, Burton’s death caused scarcely a skipped beat in Metallica’s unstoppable momentum toward world domination: Three weeks later, the bassist was replaced by speed-metal hero Jason Newsted. In one of their most interesting revelations, Brannigan and Winwood entertain (without fully dispelling) rumors that Burton and Hetfield had actually been conspiring to replace Ulrich, whose talents as drummer were as controversial as his talents at self-promotion were not. Though the writing is uneven, sometimes bogging the narrative’s momentum down in unnecessary verbosity, the authors’ enthusiasm for their subject is infectious. They’re well-placed to show how Metallica learned from their British New Wave of heavy-metal forebears and, in true Oedipal fashion, killed the fathers to create something new.
For metal heads and most fans of hard rock.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-306-82186-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: Nov. 6, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2013
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
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