A memoir that’s a lot like being at a very long Snider show, without the melodies.
A rambling memoir of life as a troubadour.
In concert, Snider has long been known for his storytelling abilities, both within his songs and (especially) between them, so a book about his escapades with the likes of Jimmy Buffett, Jerry Jeff Walker and John Prine would seem to be a natural for him. Snider claims he can’t focus unless he is heavily under the influence—of marijuana or whatever else is handy—but as he tells readers, “rest assured, during this entire time of writing you this book, I have been totally and completely focused.” The author presents himself throughout as a good-natured guy whose heart is (usually) in the right place and whose head is in the ozone. He writes of sabotaging record deals, blowing off club sets, getting robbed at a carwash by Tony Bennett (same name, different guy), getting busted, meeting his wife in rehab and learning a lesson in bighearted generosity from Garth Brooks. “Garth was a lot less music business–oriented toward me and a lot gentler and more poetic toward me than some of my supposedly art-first songwriter friends,” he writes. Snider also explains how his experiences over the years have changed his attitudes, though he remains adamant about resisting maturity: “I am devout about next to nothing, but I am devoutly not going to allow myself to grow up. I believe with all my soul that not growing up is going to be the best way to contribute to the world the best way I can. The alternative wasn’t going to help me in any way or make any of my songs better.” He also pads the narrative with full lyrics to many songs and the stories behind them, giving devout fans more insight into the man and his music.
A memoir that’s a lot like being at a very long Snider show, without the melodies.Pub Date: May 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-306-82260-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
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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