An exhaustive look at the short life of the Who’s legendary drummer. Fletcher follows Keith Moon from his childhood in the London suburb of Wembley through his apprenticeship in the Beachcombers, his 15-year tenure in the Who, and his death by overdose at the age of 32. The writer’s principal task seems to be to dispense with the apocryphal stories that surrounded Moon’s wild life. We learn, for instance, that Moon never drove a Rolls-Royce into a swimming pool (actually, while drunk, he accidentally backed the Rolls into a small pond on his property). In clarifying the record, however, Fletcher paints a vividly ugly picture of Moon as wife-beater, drunk driver, and all-out pathetic drunkard. Unfortunately, Fletcher is first and foremost a fan, and his desire not to paint too dreadful a picture of Moon leads to pleading many, many excuses for his infantile behavior, including a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder, when it seems quite clear that drugs and particularly alcohol lay at the bottom of most of Moon’s problems. Still, the musical aspects of the biography are well done; here, in tying Moon’s own story closely to the Who’s, Fletcher is at his strongest. The author conducted a broad range of interviews with industry friends and associates of Moon’s, not the least of them Who bassist John Entwistle. And Fletcher’s presentation of the Who as one of the few bands able to stand the test of time with their integrity intact is notably persuasive. When Fletcher follows Moon to his exile in California during the mid-1970s, he loses the anchor of the Who’s career, and the work suffers. Episodes regarding Moon’s abortive career as a comic actor only partially redeem these portions of it. Few questions will now remain about Moon’s life—in fact, you may know more than you wanted to. (24 pages photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Feb. 6, 1999
ISBN: 0-380-97337-5
Page Count: 632
Publisher: Avon/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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