Bowie still deserves a full-dress serious biography, which would benefit from a touch of this book’s reckless spirit.
A lengthy critical tribute to David Bowie’s pop-cultural legacy, with a particular emphasis on his epochal 1970s work.
This book by British musician and longtime pop-music writer Morley (Earthbound, 2013, etc.) is a deliberately disorganized affair. The author opens with long, often shapeless encomiums to the singer’s shape-shifting persona along with first-person gassing about his response to Bowie’s death in early 2016; he’s nearly 80 pages in before he begins delivering conventional biographical information about Bowie’s birth and upbringing. “I blame Bowie,” he writes. “He made me think this way. He made me write this way.” Morley knows his subject well, though, and once he’s settled into a narrative groove, he delivers thoughtful treatments of the earliest stages of Bowie’s career, and he has a knack for finding a rational thread for each of Bowie’s peculiar shifts in the 1960s and ’70s. An early novelty tune, “The Laughing Gnome,” is “Bowie testing all sorts of tolerances”; with his breakthrough 1971 album, “Hunky Dory,” he’s “transcending the fraught categories of male and female”; 1973's “Aladdin Sane” is “the rock album the Rolling Stones would make if they were into Brecht, Brel, Burroughs, and Ballard.” Morley foregrounds Bowie’s art over his biography: he’s less interested in why, for instance, in the ’90s, Bowie sold bonds backed by future royalties or took a role in the cult film Labyrinth than in how such moves fit with a persona afraid to ever look redundant. Morley is too often reflexively approving of everything Bowie did, and sometimes his prose slackens into nonsense (“another centre in a story filled with centres, but one that can be placed at the very centre of those centres”), but his year-by-year race through his subject’s work is often inspired, matching a grasp of history with keen critical assessment.
Bowie still deserves a full-dress serious biography, which would benefit from a touch of this book’s reckless spirit.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5115-6
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 19, 2016
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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