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
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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