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
A boon for admirers of Oz’s work and contemporary Israeli literature in general.
A moving, emotionally charged memoir of the renowned author’s youth in a newly created Israel.
“Almost everyone in Jerusalem in those days,” writes novelist Oz (The Same Sea, 2001, etc.) of the 1940s, “was either a poet or a writer or a researcher or a thinker or a scholar or a world reformer.” Oz’s uncle Joseph Klausner, for instance, kept a 25,000-volume library in every conceivable language, its dusty volumes providing a madeleine for the young writer, “the smell of a silent, secluded life devoted to scholarship,” even as his grandmother contemplated the dusty air of the Levant and concluded that the region was full of germs, whence “a thick cloud of disinfecting spirit, soaps, creams, sprays, baits, insecticides, and powder always hung in the air.” His own father had to sell his beloved books in order to buy food when money was short, though he often returned with more books. (“My mother forgave him, and so did I, because I hardly ever felt like eating anything except sweetcorn and icecream.”) Out in the street, Oz meets a young Palestinian woman who is determined to write great poems in French and English; cats bear such names as Schopenhauer and Chopin; the walls of the city ring with music and learned debate. But then there is the dark side: the war of 1948, with its Arab Legion snipers and stray shells, its heaps of dead new emigrants fresh from the Holocaust. “In Nehemiah Street,” writes Oz, “once there was a bookbinder who had a nervous breakdown, and he went out on his balcony and screamed, Jews, help, hurry, soon they’ll burn us all.” In this heady, dangerous atmosphere, torn by sectarian politics and the constant threat of terror, Oz comes of age, blossoming as a man of letters even as the bookish people of his youth begin to disappear one by one.
A boon for admirers of Oz’s work and contemporary Israeli literature in general.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2004
ISBN: 0-15-100878-7
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2004
When Kaysen was 18, in 1967, she was admitted to McLean Psychiatric Hospital outside Boston, where she would spend the next 18 months. Now, 25 years and two novels (Far Afield, 1990; Asa, As I Knew Him, 1987) later, she has come to terms with the experience- -as detailed in this searing account. First there was the suicide attempt, a halfhearted one because Kaysen made a phone call before popping the 50 aspirin, leaving enough time to pump out her stomach. The next year it was McLean, which she entered after one session with a bullying doctor, a total stranger. Still, she signed herself in: ``Reality was getting too dense...all my integrity seemed to lie in saying No.'' In the series of snapshots that follows, Kaysen writes as lucidly about the dark jumble inside her head as she does about the hospital routines, the staff, the patients. Her stay didn't coincide with those of various celebrities (Ray Charles, Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell), but we are not likely to forget Susan, ``thin and yellow,'' who wrapped everything in sight in toilet paper, or Daisy, whose passions were laxatives and chicken. The staff is equally memorable: ``Our keepers. As for finders—well, we had to be our own finders.'' There was no way the therapists—those dispensers of dope (Thorazine, Stelazine, Mellaril, Librium, Valium)—might improve the patients' conditions: Recovery was in the lap of the gods (``I got better and Daisy didn't and I can't explain why''). When, all these years later, Kaysen reads her diagnosis (``Borderline Personality''), it means nothing when set alongside her descriptions of the ``parallel universe'' of the insane. It's an easy universe to enter, she assures us. We believe her. Every word counts in this brave, funny, moving reconstruction. For Kaysen, writing well has been the best revenge.
Pub Date: June 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-679-42366-4
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1993
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