An intimate portrait of the multifaceted and beguiling Jones, who forever changed popular music and culture.
A lively biography of the enigmatic founder of the Rolling Stones, who was dethroned and died just as the band approached its artistic peak.
Raised in the conservative enclave of Cheltenham, Brian Jones’ (1942-1969) family life was the epitome of middle-class English repression and conformity. However, the bureaucratic culture of Cheltenham would mold Jones’ complex, roguish personality. Music journalist Trynka’s (David Bowie: Starman, 2011, etc.) portrait is that of a young man determined to get what he wanted, flaunting conventions and consequences and exhibiting little conscience as he cemented his ambition to become a professional musician. His obsession with American blues led him to London, where Jones immediately made a name for himself and soon met Mick Jagger and Keith Richards through the circle of musicians that hung around impresario Alexis Korner. It was Jones who corralled the members of the Rolling Stones, named the band after a Muddy Waters lyric, and influenced the band’s musical style by teaching Richards open G tuning, a blues staple that would define the Stones’ sound. There was no question that Jones was the Stones’ unrivaled leader. As they began charting success, they quickly became infamous for their infighting and drama, and the power struggles between Jones and the Jagger-Richards axis, often involving women, were well-documented. Eventually, Jones was dismissed, and several weeks later, he was found dead in his swimming pool, the exact details of his death still a controversy. Trynka expertly explores the paradoxes of Jones’ inner life, drawing on countless interviews of friends and fellow musicians, but there are times when the author comes across as righteously defensive of Jones, despite correcting many of the apparently erroneous claims made by Richards in his own autobiography. Occasionally, Trynka’s evidence creates a he said, she said situation that fails to definitively set the record straight. There is no disputing, however, that Jones was the mastermind of the Stones, and Trynka’s well-researched biography rightly reclaims his legacy.
An intimate portrait of the multifaceted and beguiling Jones, who forever changed popular music and culture.Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2014
ISBN: 978-0670014743
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 9, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2014
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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