Interesting drugged-out memories from the original manager of the infamous hippie rock group. Scully was introduced to the Dead by LSD guru Owsley Stanley and became the band's manager-by-default, helping to shape this group of ``crazy-looking guys, high on acid, who had come together higgledy-piggledy'' into the ultimate San Francisco trips band. He is at his best describing, with Dalton (coauthor of Faithfull, not reviewed), the early days of the Dead, when they lived communally in the famous Victorian house at 710 Ashbury Street. With considerable good humor and irony, he recreates the hippie dream of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll, along the way describing a memorable cast of characters. An obvious devotee of Jerry Garcia (who emerges as the hero of the group and the book), Scully is harder on the other band members, including Bob Weir, whom he describes as a pitifully inept rhythm guitarist who longs for mainstream pop success; Mickey Hart, a talented drummer, but an opportunist; the eternally drunk and musically limited Pigpen (who is the band's first casualty); musically pretentious Phil Lesh; and stingy Bill Kreutzmann. The book offers valuable insight into the making of the Dead's albums, showing why they have always been better live than in the studio. Memories of the '70s and '80s are less fully realized, as the authors resort to reproducing unedited tour diaries. Scully portrays Garcia's (and his own) early '80s descent into heroin addiction with painful honesty, showing how the rest of the band labored to keep the act alive, even at the price of Garcia's health. The book ends with a brief epilogue written after the news of Garcia's death. An American epic, if not exactly an American Beauty. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Jan. 2, 1996
ISBN: 0-316-77712-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1995
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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