A great way to better understand the man behind the garish glasses and platform boots.
Veteran rock journalist Doyle (Man on the Run: Paul McCartney in the 1970s, 2014, etc.) continues his foray into the 1970s music scene with a compelling profile of an unlikely rock star.
There wasn’t much demand for portly and pug-nosed piano players when young Reginald Dwight (b. 1947) first dove headlong into the music industry in Pinner, England, at the close of the 1960s. That, however, didn’t deter the quintessential outsider from chasing his dream. In chronicling Elton John’s stratospheric rise to fame, replete with platinum records, increasingly outlandish stage shows, and mountains of cash, the author deftly manages to keep his subject in sharp focus. Based on hours of one-on-one interviews with Captain Fantastic himself, this breezy yet comprehensive biography demonstrates what it was like for the talented musician to churn out an impossible string of hit records alongside lyricist Bernie Taupin. “If Elton seemed super-confident, even invincible,” writes Doyle, “then he would sometimes make funny, self-deprecating remarks in interviews about his appearance, saying he couldn’t possibly compete with the likes of David Bowie or Mick Jagger when it came to their slinky stagewear. ‘I haven’t got the figure for it,’ he admitted.” The author neither sidesteps nor belabors John’s clashes with the aforementioned stars, drug use, and struggles with his homosexuality. The result is an intriguing portrait of the artist as a human being. As portrayed here, John comes off as sometimes-distant, moody, and given to spectacular outbursts of rage that usually required expensive gifts to sooth hurt feelings afterward. At various points in his career, John fired his band, made Cher cry, and truly pissed off his good friend Rod Stewart. None of that, however, detracts from Doyle’s sympathetic portrayal, which concludes with a discography.
A great way to better understand the man behind the garish glasses and platform boots.Pub Date: March 21, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-101-88418-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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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