As rock bios go, this just isn’t heavy enough.
Black Sabbath’s founding guitarist recounts the British metal band’s chaotic history.
Iommi’s as-told-to book, co-authored by T.J. Lammers, offers a rote look at his foundational group’s story, which practically ended before it began. At 17, the aspiring axe man sliced off two fingertips while operating a machine press. Inspired by the example of gypsy virtuoso Django Reinhardt, who performed brilliantly after his hand was severely burned, Iommi continued to play, with self-fabricated “thimbles” extending his digits. He soon hooked up with three other Birmingham, England, lads—singer Ozzy Osbourne, bassist Geezer Butler and drummer Bill Ward—to form Black Sabbath, whose churning, down-tuned music drew the metal road map. Iommi, the band’s resident riff-master and studio obsessive, unimaginatively recalls the band’s story album by album and tour by tour, without explicating the group’s unique sound, internal chemistry or propensity for provoking public outrage. He’s most entertaining when describing the Sabbath’s incessant, hazardous prank-playing; much of the “fun” came at the expense of Ward, who was nearly suffocated by a coat of gold spray paint and almost fatally incinerated after Iommi doused him with tape-machine head cleaner and set him ablaze. The guitarist is not wholly unaware of the oft-ludicrous nature of his enterprise: One of the best chapters recalls the building of a massive, misbegotten Stonehenge stage set, which inspired a choice gag in This is Spinal Tap. But he is unable to shed light on the band mates’ fraught relationships (exacerbated by drug and alcohol abuse), Sabbath’s hellish business affairs or his own chronic cocaine use and failed marriages. Excepting a rich passage about a once-unthinkable 2002 command performance before Queen Elizabeth II, the late going devolves into an unenlightening recap of the band’s revolving-door post-Osbourne years, when it was fronted by singers Ronnie James Dio, Ian Gillan and others, and its latter-day reunion gigs. However, readers do learn that Michael Bolton unsuccessfully auditioned for the position of lead vocalist.
As rock bios go, this just isn’t heavy enough.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-306-81955-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2011
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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