It’s only rock ’n’ roll writing, but Sheffield nails it.
Rolling Stone contributing editor Sheffield (Talking to Girls About Duran Duran: One Young Man's Quest for True Love and a Cooler Haircut, 2010, etc.) muses on love, loss, life, Rod Stewart, female Rush fans and much more in an homage to the art and attitude of karaoke.
Moving to New York City in 2000 as a young widower—his wife died at age 31—Sheffield spent most of his time “in a catatonic stupor on my couch, caked in despair and Cheetos dust.” Then he discovered karaoke and met Ally, the astronomer and fellow “rock-geek” he would later marry. Coming from a long line of Irishmen with bad voices, Sheffield found that in karaoke, perfection didn’t matter, effort did: “It’s a place where no-talents and low talents and too-low-for-zero-talents tolerate each other, even enjoy each other, as we commit brutal crimes of love against music.” If perfection is missing, a shared community of momentary rock stardom and mutual support is not. So it was with Ally, his partner in karaoke obsession, but they were, and are, different people. In a long passage containing some solid marriage advice, Sheffield warns to “give up on the idea of perfection”—however, you must work at it. The author wanders far afield, from family memories to karaoke nights in a Florida senior living village to hilarious takes on music’s biggest names—e.g., David Bowie was “the only rock star who ever pretended to be from outer space in order to seem less weird.” Throughout, Sheffield returns to the theme of the mysterious ways music can bring people together, offering hope and renewal. Eschewing cynicism, the author writes with a seemingly effortless blend of evocative pathos and spot-on humor that moves and inspires.
It’s only rock ’n’ roll writing, but Sheffield nails it.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-220762-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: It Books/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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