This stellar book will appeal to students, scholars, and general readers interested in modern technology’s startling effects...
Musician Dolby (Arts/Johns Hopkins Univ.) debuts with an absorbing account of his pioneering work merging digital music with film, technology, and science.
Born in 1958 to a Cambridge archaeologist, the author dropped out of school to pursue musical interests after finding a synthesizer in a dumpster. Often mixing sound for bands, he worked as a solo singer/songwriter, with such quirky hits as “She Blinded Me with Science” (1982) and “Hyperactive!” (1984), and began producing short silent film–like music videos as well as soundtracks for computer games and computer-generated animation. By the 1990s, Dolby’s unusual tinkering with computer software bridged the worlds of the music business and Silicon Valley, where his companies developed mobile-phone ringtones and other products. In this story-filled memoir, the author draws deeply on his experiences as a synthesized music guru and early internet geek, offering wonderful scenes involving such notables as Michael Jackson, Joni Mitchell, David Bowie, Steve Jobs, and George Lucas and revealing his battles for artistic control with major record companies. With little interest in the business side (“What’s a business model?” he replies to a venture capitalist interested in a Dolby company), he has always regarded himself as “a perfectionist who will choose great art over a pile of cash every time.” As a result, he struggled unhappily in the music and technology industries, both of which he deems “random and unjust.” Yet his innovative accomplishments, rendered in fascinating detail here, are legendary: “Synthesis, music videos, software, the Web, DIY filmmaking, mobile devices, online games…I just dived in and taught myself by trial and error.” The former TED Conference music director now composes on a restored 33-foot lifeboat in the garden of his home in Suffolk and teaches film and media at Hopkins.
This stellar book will appeal to students, scholars, and general readers interested in modern technology’s startling effects on music and popular culture.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-07184-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 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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