The genius behind the Kinks escorts a fictional interlocutor through the first three decades of his life, with much of the perversity, charm, and uneasy wit of his most ambitious lyrics. A couple of decades in the future, the all-powerful Corporation sends a disturbed young employee out to assemble the details of Ray Davies's illustrious career. The Davies this narrator meets is a seedy, manipulative, not necessarily reliable old recluse whose motives for unburdening himself to a stranger are possibly sinister. Davies, the character, announces that he might not be telling the truth; Davies, the author, is erecting a whole lot of complications around a fairly standard memoir of the irrational process of becoming and remaining a pop star. He describes efficiently the familiar clichÇs of British-Invasion- rocker background: rebellious postwar childhood, art college, rapture over American blues records, rapid escalation to fame in the wake of the Beatles' success. What kept the Kinks from slinking back into obscurity was Davies's ability to write songs like ``Sunny Afternoon'' and ``Waterloo Sunset,'' which are so evocative partly because their first-person narrators, as in this book, at once represent Davies and a fictional persona. Happily, Davies knows which of his songs are of lasting merit, and he discusses their genesis insightfully. Because of bad recording and publishing deals signed in 1964, at the start of the Kinks' career, he spent most of the rest of the '60s in legal wrangles that left him somewhat traumatized; Davies conveys the distressing slapstick of having a prolific, internationally successful band and little to show for it. He takes us only through 1973, which marked an emotional and aesthetic nadir, and then, in the fictional frame, describes his own death. Given the elaborate disavowals of sincerity, it's unclear whether Ray's really this dour or whether he's just breaking for a sequel. An overweening but entertaining mess.
Pub Date: Sept. 25, 1995
ISBN: 0-87951-611-9
Page Count: 420
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1995
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
PERSPECTIVES
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