Indispensable for understanding the culture of the ’60s and the music that was at its heart.
A memoir by one of the founders of rock criticism, on the era that gave him his vocation and ultimately broke his heart.
Goldstein (Homocons: The Rise of the Gay Right, 2003, etc.) whose work in the Village Voice of the 1960s showed that it was possible to write serious criticism of the music of his generation, grew up in the Bronx as a nerdy kid who would sneak out of his neighborhood with a pair of sandals hidden in a bag so the neighborhood toughs wouldn’t beat him up. But his true passion was early rock ’n’ roll, doo-wop and the girl groups. He also became aware of the civil rights movement and took part in the 1963 March on Washington. Acquaintance with the likes of Lou Reed and Andy Warhol, combined with a Columbia journalism degree, led to a job writing about music and pop culture for the Voice. The cachet of the Voice got him into the hotel rooms of every major rock star of the era. While many treated him as just another newspaperman, he made friends with others, including Janis Joplin. Goldstein was also keeping his hand in the radical political scene, ultimately making a trip to the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention. That marked the beginning of his disillusion with the ideals of his generation, as the radical resistance to the nomination of Hubert Humphrey culminated in the election of Richard Nixon. A series of deaths in the rock world—most devastating to Goldstein, that of Joplin—depressed him further. He felt the machinery of hype had taken the music away from those who loved it. Writer’s block set in, along with a crisis of identity that led him to recast himself as a gay rights advocate. Goldstein gives a deeply felt and largely compelling portrait of an age that indelibly marked everyone who took part in it.
Indispensable for understanding the culture of the ’60s and the music that was at its heart.Pub Date: April 14, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-62040-887-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2014
PERSPECTIVES
PROFILES
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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