Part celebration, part poignant reflection, Aoki’s life story is as rhythmic and textured as his music.
A trendsetter in the electronic dance music genre lays down a portrait of self-discovery in shades of blue.
Growing up “the only Asian kid in a lily-white, same-seeming neighborhood [in] Newport Beach, California,” Aoki, one of the world’s most popular DJs, portrays himself as “the quintessential outsider.” He was an equal mix of his larger-than-life, Benihana restaurant–founding father and his more reserved mother—“a compassionate soul. A gentle spirit. An open mind.” He spent his youth stirring restlessly in the sanctuary of music, devoting himself first to Michael Jackson and later to hardcore and punk, all of which would inform his future sound as a leader in the EDM scene. “[I] wasn’t planning on becoming a DJ. Never even thought about it,” he writes. “And so the story of how I went from an aspiring musician to a promoter to a record label ‘executive’ to where I am now is a lesson in resilience, resourcefulness.” Detailing those lessons, Aoki moves through the years, from his earliest hardcore garage band memories and 1996 founding of Dim Mak Records to his first appearances at Coachella, when he was still searching for his voice. Eventually developing motifs such as “caking” audiences that came to embody his style, he matured as an artist and eventually achieved whirlwind notoriety that quickly spun into icon status among denizens of the EDM subculture. Throughout, the author shares candid self-assessments and revealing insights about major events in his life, including his divorce, his father’s death, and his struggles with drinking. As he writes, “I didn’t realize it at the time but my early shows had no essence to them…no heart…no personality. I couldn’t put myself into what I was doing because I was hiding in the fog of being drunk….Connectivity…that became my thing. Should have been my thing all along.”
Part celebration, part poignant reflection, Aoki’s life story is as rhythmic and textured as his music.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-11167-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Aug. 24, 2019
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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
