A tonic for tough times filled with plainspoken lyricism, gratitude, and good humor.
Memories and musings from the winter solstice of a life.
"Better to know where to go than how to get there,” writes the veteran essayist and author of fiction and nonfiction. “I wander from thought to thought, having learned but three things from my long night's moon. I believe in life. I believe in love. I believe we are responsible for each other.” At 80, the author is in the "cold moon" of his life, the last full moon of the year. In brief passages connected by association and with the improvisational feel of jazz, he moves fluidly among memoir, philosophy, natural history, and inspiration, riffing on everything from the migration of the Kemp’s Ridley sea turtle to the landscape photographs of Oleg Ershov and the plot of a movie he saw in 1946 called Stairway to Heaven. It played for one week in the only movie theater in Westport, Connecticut, and when his mother took 5-year-old Roger to see it on Monday, he asked her to take him again every day after that. After each viewing, they would walk next door for a soda, and his mother would ask him if the movie had been as good as the day before. Better, he would say. Though much of the book is a meditation on aging, it is illuminated by childhood memories like this, one more charming and emblematic than the next. In another passage, the author recounts walking into a stranger's house and sitting down to play their gorgeous Steinway, which had “the gleam of a black stallion.” When the neighbor escorted her 6-year-old visitor home, she commented to his mother on his fearlessness. "It's the way he is," his mother replied. "He thinks the world is waiting for him to walk in and play the piano." Nearly 75 years later, he hasn't changed a bit.
A tonic for tough times filled with plainspoken lyricism, gratitude, and good humor.Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-885983-88-6
Page Count: 104
Publisher: Turtle Point
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
A memoir of vivid detail and understandable ambivalence.
The bassist for Prince during the Purple Rain era provides glimpses into the kingdom.
BrownMark—who was born Mark Brown in 1962—describes his rise from a single-parent home in a city of racial discrimination (Minneapolis) to success with the musical supernova. Yet there were plenty of bumps along the way. For example, in 1982, even a big raise only brought his salary to $425 per week; later, he quit after discovering that his Purple Rain Tour bonus that he’d imagined might be $1.5 million was in fact only $15,000. Those looking for a memoir awash in sex, drugs, and the seamier sides of Prince’s private life will instead discover hard work and rigid discipline under a stern taskmaster, an artist who became what he was through minute attention to detail as well as genius. The author ably chronicles his own life growing up Black in a city so White he thought of it as a “Scandinavian Mecca.” As a boy, his family didn’t have a TV, and his early experiences playing music involved a makeshift guitar constructed out of a shoe box and rubber bands. Before he auditioned for Prince, he had never been to the suburbs, and before he joined the band, he had never been on a plane. His life changed dramatically at a time when the world of music was changing, as well. Disco was breaking down walls between Black and White, and punk was bringing a new edge and urgency. As Prince’s star was ascending, he demanded the full spotlight and resented any response his young bassist was generating. The author left the band in the mid-1980s feeling that he lived “in a world of filth, greed, and deception.” Still, the connections and impressions he made as a member of The Revolution launched his career, and he notes that “working with Prince was like going to the finest music school in the land.” One of Kirkus and Rolling Stone’s Best Music Books of 2020.
A memoir of vivid detail and understandable ambivalence.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5179-0927-7
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Univ. of Minnesota
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
If that promise of clarity is what awaits us all, then death doesn’t seem so awful, and that is a great gift from Sacks. A...
Valediction from the late neurologist and writer Sacks (On the Move: A Life, 2015, etc.).
In this set of four short essays, much-forwarded opinion pieces from the New York Times, the author ponders illness, specifically the metastatic cancer that spread from eye to liver and in doing so foreclosed any possibility of treatment. His brief reflections on that unfortunate development give way to, yes, gratitude as he examines the good things that he has experienced over what, in the end, turned out to be a rather long life after all, lasting 82 years. To be sure, Sacks has regrets about leaving the world, not least of them not being around to see “a thousand…breakthroughs in the physical and biological sciences,” as well as the night sky sprinkled with stars and the yellow legal pads on which he worked sprinkled with words. Sacks works a few familiar tropes and elaborates others. Charmingly, he reflects on his habit since childhood of associating each year of his life with the element of corresponding atomic weight on the periodic table; given polonium’s “intense, murderous radioactivity,” then perhaps 84 isn’t all that it’s cut out to be. There are some glaring repetitions here, unfortunate given the intense brevity of this book, such as his twice citing Nathaniel Hawthorne’s call to revel in “intercourse with the world”—no, not that kind. Yet his thoughts overall—while not as soul-stirringly inspirational as the similar reflections of Randy Pausch or as bent on chasing down the story as Christopher Hitchens’ last book—are shaped into an austere beauty, as when Sacks writes of being able in his final moments to “see my life as from a great altitude, as a sort of landscape, and with a deepening sense of the connection of all its parts.”
If that promise of clarity is what awaits us all, then death doesn’t seem so awful, and that is a great gift from Sacks. A fitting, lovely farewell.Pub Date: Nov. 24, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-451-49293-7
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2015
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