A good enough introduction to Roxon, but much less interesting than she was.
Australian journalist Milliken resurrects the woman who shaped how Americans think about rock ’n’ roll.
Lillian Roxon was born in 1932 on the Italian Riviera to Jewish parents. They fled the Nazis and moved to Australia when she was eight. Eventually, Roxon found her calling in journalism and, in 1959, headed to America, where she would live until her death from asthma at age 41. Not only did she shoot to the top in rock writing, cementing her spot as grande dame with the 1969 publication of Lillian Roxon’s Rock Encyclopedia, but she also wrote about pop feminism and contributed a sex column to Mademoiselle. Contemporaries likened her to Dorothy Parker—only Roxon, they said, was nicer, warmer. Drawing on many primary sources, including Roxon’s papers in Sydney’s Mitchell Library, Milliken is able to offer a sense of his subject’s emotional life. We read about Roxon’s tangles with her mother, the fraught friendship with Linda Eastman (which ended when she became Linda McCartney and dropped Roxon), and her difficult relationship with Germaine Greer. The last third of the text comprises a selection of Roxon’s own writing, including her wonderful, controversial 1970 essay “There is a Tide in the Affairs of Women.” This biography isn’t all-out superficial, but Milliken hasn’t exactly plumbed the depths either. For example, the author touches on Roxon’s anxiety about being overweight, but doesn’t discuss how body image shaped her relationships and her feminism. Indeed, Milliken strains in a somewhat toadying fashion to establish Roxon’s importance, a task that interferes with telling her life story. Even the subtitle is a bit grandiose: Roxon was not the “mother of rock” but a fan and a critic—culture-maker, sure, but not mama.
A good enough introduction to Roxon, but much less interesting than she was.Pub Date: May 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-56025-671-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2005
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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