An absorbing and layered study of “one of the most influential voices in Western popular culture.”
A biography of the singer/songwriter who helped define the cultural landscape of the 1960s as half of the folk-rock duo Simon & Garfunkel and who later achieved massive success as a solo artist.
At an impromptu school assembly in 1952, Paul Simon (b. 1941) first heard his classmate Art Garfunkel sing, though they didn’t know each other at the time. The experience made an impression on the young Simon, who saw in Garfunkel his nascent desire to become a singer and star. As freelance journalist and veteran music writer Carlin (Bruce, 2012, etc.) observes in his nuanced, fascinating portrait, Simon’s friendship with Garfunkel would be the defining relationship of his life, both professionally and personally. Their brotherly and often contentious friendship would see them rise during the 1960s from humble wannabes with second lives in law school and a graduate program in mathematics to pop superstars. Growing up in a musical household—his father, Louis, was a professional bass player—Simon’s musical interests were encouraged, and he received early lessons in the business, which would influence his shrewd approach to making deals. As Carlin notes, however, Louis would become resentful of his son’s success and would harangue him to give up his career to become a teacher despite being a world-renowned pop star. This feeling of inferiority would fuel Simon’s lifelong identity crisis, as he adopted many pseudonyms throughout his career, notably Jerry Landis, and constantly struggled with fame and his own abilities. Carlin expertly tracks Simon’s professional career, from the earliest days with Garfunkel when they were finding their footing as performers, through the climax of their career as a band with their 1970 album “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” to Simon’s solo artistic peak with the 1986 release of “Graceland.” Simon’s music career defies easy categorization—much as his relationship with Garfunkel does—but in Carlin’s portrayal, his legacy as an innovative songwriter and musician is undeniable.
An absorbing and layered study of “one of the most influential voices in Western popular culture.”Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-62779-034-5
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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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