Tooze breaks little new ground, but the book is a reliable, readable life of an influential musician.
A biography of the legendary drummer and pioneer of Americana.
Levon Helm (1940-2012) hailed from Turkey Scratch, Arkansas, situated in a region where blacks and whites toiled side by side in the fields and shared songs as they did—and on Saturday nights, too, when nearby towns beckoned with their itinerant hucksters and song-and-dance players. “Today,” he remarked, “when folks ask me where rock ’n’ roll came from, I always think of our Southern medicine shows and that wild midnight ramble.” Helm mastered the guitar, mandolin, and other instruments early on, but it was as a drummer that he became known, playing in fellow Arkansan Ronnie Hawkins’ Hawks, whose otherwise Canadian members eventually formed The Band. Tooze, previously a biographer of Helm’s hero, Muddy Waters, spins a story that is well known thanks to Helm’s own memoir This Wheel’s on Fire (1993) and band mate Robbie Robertson’s Testimony (2016). Tooze’s musical vocabulary is solid—“His drumming seems random here as he playfully intersperses parts on the ride and hi-hat with drags, all in an eighth-note groove”—and her reconstruction of The Band’s chronology is accurate, as when she notes that Levon came late to the sessions that would become the Bob Dylan/Band collaboration released as The Basement Tapes. She also notes that in its own day, The Band was not as beloved as it would become later; the group’s third release, Stage Fright, was its most commercially successful, for example, “even though the reviews were lukewarm.” A strong theme in the closing sections of the book, after the group broke up, was Helm’s animosity toward Robertson, whom he resented for controlling the publishing rights to The Band’s music and “cheating the remaining bandmates out of songwriting royalties.” As with the rest of the book, that story is well known—and still unresolved years after Helm’s death.
Tooze breaks little new ground, but the book is a reliable, readable life of an influential musician.Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-63576-704-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Diversion Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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