A memoir that reveals more about the author than her subject, while challenging the truism that if you can remember the...
In this bio about the man responsible for the highest-quality LSD, the subject keeps his distance from both the reader and the author.
As the acid king and the sonic mastermind behind the Grateful Dead’s live sound, Owsley “Bear” Stanley (1935–2011) was a major figure in San Francisco hippiedom, worthy of his own biography, though often relegated to supporting-player status in accounts of the era. This memoir can’t quite serve as a corrective, since the author wasn’t the partner to the man known to all as Bear as she would have liked to be. She took his last name after the two had split, when she left the psychedelic life for dental school and wanted to have the same name as her son that he had fathered. And they were never really together when they were together, because he had another girlfriend who had been around longer and took priority. When the author asked that other woman for help with the book, she replied, “Oh, God, no. I don’t want to recall the little that I think I can remember.” Memory is a key issue in this book, written with the late Tom Davis, for the author leaves little doubt that she was usually tripping, while often simultaneously having sex or dancing the night away, leaving readers to wonder how she could possibly take the notes for direct quotations that can run for a paragraph. Bear, we learn, looked “like a hippie Dracula” and “saw his role as a psychedelic Prometheus.” He abhorred alcohol but ate red meat and enjoyed indiscriminate sex (though he could be jealous when his partners behaved similarly). The author, who worked for both Bear and the Dead, learned that “free sex was fraught with danger.”
A memoir that reveals more about the author than her subject, while challenging the truism that if you can remember the ’60s, you weren’t there.Pub Date: April 2, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-9833589-3-0
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Monkfish
Review Posted Online: Feb. 24, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2013
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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