A solid memoir mostly for fans of the band.
A coming-of-age memoir about how the Canadian twin sisters became successful recording artists.
When they started high school, Tegan and Sara Quin considered themselves oddballs, outcasts, and misfits. They were big music fans—Nirvana, Green Day, the Smashing Pumpkins—but had no particular musical aspirations. Other than being identical twins, there was not much to distinguish them from other teenagers trying to navigate the awkward years—certainly nothing to suggest that they would soon become young recording stars and icons of the burgeoning LGBTQ community. These were pivotal years for the sisters, and their musical success would prove transformative. However, music almost seems like an afterthought here, as the authors proceed in alternating chapters to show how their experience was fairly typical. They did lots of drugs, got blackout drunk on occasion, went to parties that got out of control, experienced their sexual awakenings, and wrestled with their sexual identities. Both had boyfriends and girlfriends, and both struggled with the issue of whether a particular girl was her best friend or something more. They also fought a lot. The music came when they found a guitar that belonged to their stepfather and separately began writing songs and then harmonizing with each other’s songs. The sisters also hid many of their experiences from each other, so it proved cathartic to write and share. “I wrote lyrics that sometimes felt too close to the bone,” remembers Sara, recalling how the unraveling of her relationship with her girlfriend contributed to her songwriting surge. After arranging the song with her sister, she writes, “when we finished, I felt lighter.” Their friends became fans of their music, and a self-recorded cassette helped expand that fandom. Winning a prestigious talent contest earned them studio time, and they marked their 18th birthdays by signing with one of the recording labels that had been pursuing them.
A solid memoir mostly for fans of the band.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-982112-66-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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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