The Stones’ dog-eared story is better told in a dozen other accounts.
A numbingly familiar look back at the Stones’ 50-year career.
Pete Fornatale (Back to the Garden: The Story of Woodstock and How It Changed a Generation, 2010, etc.), who died in April 2012, was a longtime host at New York’s WNEW, an FM radio power with access to some of the biggest names of the classic-rock era. Old on-air interviews with most of the Stones conducted by the author and his colleague Dave Herman serve as the foundation for this fawning oral history, much of which will be old news to fans of the band. The biggest problem with any rehash of the group’s career at this point is that nearly everyone with a tale to tell has already told it at full length. Band members Keith Richards, Bill Wyman and Ronnie Wood have all published their own books, some of which are excerpted here. Mick Jagger hasn’t taken pen in hand yet, but he is already a past master of the interview that says nothing. A lengthy sit-down with Pete Fornatale, conducted in 1989 on the launch of the Stones’ clothing line, is a main attraction here, and it could not be more vacuous. Is there anything new to be gleaned about the band’s early history from Andrew Loog Oldham or Marianne Faithfull after their fine memoirs? Can journalist Robert Greenfield offer any fresh insights about the band’s 1972 tour not found in his definitive report STP? At the other end of the interview spectrum, the writer offers wince-inducing recollections from the hoi polloi: co-author Bernard Corbett on his junior high years as a Stones fan, radio engineer Jeremy Rainer on his duty as an extra in the concert movie Shine a Light. Dully told and messily designed, the book is a dutifully assembled piece of anniversary product that does little to illuminate the Stones' saga.
The Stones’ dog-eared story is better told in a dozen other accounts.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-60819-921-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2012
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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