This comprehensive overview outstrips Humphries’s effort, although fans may flinch over a passage that needlessly speculates...
Meticulous portrait of the gentle English singer/songwriter whose posthumous impact on the music world continues to gather force.
For someone with only three albums to his name, very little success in his lifetime and a career cut short by a possibly accidental drug overdose at age 26, Drake may not strike the casual reader as a particularly promising subject for a second biography. Acknowledging his debt to Patrick Humphries’s Nick Drake (1998), British music executive Dann manages to squeeze out enough revelations to make this volume a worthwhile companion to its predecessor. One essential component here is the involvement of producer Joe Boyd, who helped sculpt the cripplingly shy musician’s albums into coherence. A key player in the story, Boyd refused to participate in Humphries’s book. Dann’s text carefully traces Drake’s brief life, noting his wealthy upbringing in the sleepy English town of Tamworth-in-Arden, his time at Cambridge University, the all-too-brief relationships he enjoyed (most notably with folk singer Linda Thompson) and a life-changing experience in the French town of Aix-en-Provence, where he fleetingly performed for the Rolling Stones. Figures such as the doctor who treated Drake for depression, his former tutor at Cambridge and even Elton John all offer illuminating words on this precocious talent. The author’s in-depth familiarity with music history (the title is a nod to John Hammond’s 1992 documentary The Search for Robert Johnson) helps him convey to readers just how out-of-sync Drake was with the music scene of the late 1960s and early ’70s.
This comprehensive overview outstrips Humphries’s effort, although fans may flinch over a passage that needlessly speculates about Drake’s sexuality.Pub Date: Oct. 30, 2006
ISBN: 0-306-81520-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2006
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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
