On the B-list, as showbiz memoirs go, but entertaining enough.
Longtime agent/manager Gordon, whose clients and confidants have ranged from Teddy Pendergrass to Roger Vergé, tells all.
It’s not all golf and heart attacks in the glitzy world of showbiz, to say nothing of sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll, though all those things certainly figure in close proximity in Gordon’s memoir. Tellingly, the story begins with sex and drugs all rolled up in a singular person, when the naïve kid arrives in Hollywood from New York and, having dropped acid, busts up what he thinks is a rape only to be told not at all gently by Janis Joplin that the rough and tumble out by the pool is deliberate. Enter Jimi Hendrix and Bobby Neuwirth and Frank Zappa and a succession of Los Angeles machers who take a shine to the kid and point him toward the lucrative world of artist management. The sentimental education came with plenty of raps on the knuckles, as when Gordon briefly managed an up-and-coming English band called Pink Floyd only to lose the quartet over an unpaid gig, at which Jerry Wexler schooled him: “The three most important things a manager does are, number one, get the money. Number two, always remember to get the money. Number three, never forget to always remember to get the money.” Money is a theme and a minor obsession here, but some sunlight creeps through that wall of green: Don Ho turns out to be a nice guy, Alice Cooper and Groucho Marx unlikely bedfellows, Timothy Leary may not be the fellow you’d want to leave alone with your food but a mensch. For his part, Gordon, who certainly has tales to tell, comes off as a blowhard on one page and a meditative beachcomber on the next even as his indifferently written narrative careens between dressing rooms and green rooms, rockers and foodies.
On the B-list, as showbiz memoirs go, but entertaining enough.Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-235595-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Anthony Bourdain/Ecco
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2016
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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