A sometimes-gritty, sometimes-charming memoir that pays tribute to the American recording industry.
A memoir detailing the 1966 founding of Sire Records and the author’s journey through six decades in the music industry discovering talent like the Talking Heads, the Ramones, Madonna, and many others.
Of all the great music men who emerged from the 1960s record industry—from the Ertegun brothers of Atlantic Records to Warner’s Mo Ostin, Morris Levy, Jerry Wexler, and Berry Gordy—Stein has one of the most nuanced stories. As the author explains, from his late teens, he knew music was his destiny: “I’d lie on my bed, studying the small print on the sleeves: King, Apollo, Mercury, Aladdin, Excelsior, Atlantic, Miracle, Sun, Chess, Vee-Jay, Modern…all these castles and flags from across the land.” After a couple of years working at Billboard magazine, learning the charts and grooming himself as a music journalist, Stein landed with Syd Nathan, the recording legend and founder of King Records, who showed him the “shellac in his veins.” Why merely write about music when you can be making music history—and real money? Convinced, Stein packed it up and did two summer internships with Nathan in Cincinnati, where he learned every function of the King empire. Within years, the author had earned lots of money and enough experience to co-found his own label, Sire Records. With Sire, he spent the next couple of decades signing major acts—e.g., Madonna, Depeche Mode, Echo and the Bunnymen—and became a pioneer of the new wave, punk, and post-punk genres along the way. Intertwined with behind-the-scenes tales of mayhem and craziness of the 1970s and ’80s, Stein weaves down-to-earth storytelling about his Jewish upbringing in 1950s Brooklyn and his childhood fascination with Coney Island and how it stoked his young imagination, leading to his future life in music.
A sometimes-gritty, sometimes-charming memoir that pays tribute to the American recording industry.Pub Date: June 12, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-08101-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: April 2, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2018
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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