Must-read for those who love that era and want a fresh perspective on it.
A musician’s memoir of punk rock in its New York City heyday shows how much fun it was while it lasted, before AIDS and heroin had the last laugh.
As frontman for the Senders, Marcade never saw his band achieve the notoriety of the Ramones, Blondie, Talking Heads, or others that played CBGBs and Max’s Kansas City, but his memoir has an antic vitality and humor that seem to encapsulate the spirit of those times. Everything seemed so funny—even nodding out from heroin, throwing up from overindulgence, and getting tossed into jail, where the teenage Marcade begins this account after getting busted for dope. A French native, he had come to America for adventure. He found his share and also found himself in the middle of the punk scene that was soon to emerge on the Lower East Side. Everyone seemed to know him and like him—former New York Doll Johnny Thunders brought him from Boston to New York and provided entree. The Clash appreciated him so much that they invited the Senders to open for them at their peak. Marcade was the one who, by his account, told Nancy Spungen to follow her heart to London, where she began her fatal romance with the Sex Pistols’ Sid Vicious. (“You need love, not heroin,” he remembers telling her.) There are a number of hilarious, outrageous scenes involving pets—not just dogs and cats, but monkeys—or parties, and some featuring both, and there is plenty of insider observation: “The Ramones got along great with everybody, which was funny because they couldn’t stand each other.” And there are way too many exclamation points. Ultimately, AIDS cost many their lives and others their sexual freedom. Heroin also took many of Marcade’s friends, his marriage, and his band. Written 35 years after he kicked his addiction for good, the book retains the madcap spirit of that time and place, suggesting how punk happened and why it had to end.
Must-read for those who love that era and want a fresh perspective on it.Pub Date: May 2, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-941110-49-2
Page Count: 245
Publisher: Three Rooms Press
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
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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