With childlike adoration and prose to match, a British radio host and newspaper columnist has a go at Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel’s intertwined careers. The two singers were born in 1941 and grew up together in Queens, New York. Billed as Tom and Jerry, they had a minor hit (—Hey Schoolgirl—) at age 16; after college, as themselves, Simon and Garfunkel cut an indifferently received album in 1964. Simon then went off to England for a few months, where he played the folk circuit and released a solo album; this period receives exhaustive comment here. When an overlooked song, —The Sound of Silence,— started getting airplay half a year after its release, Simon and Garfunkel suddenly became big stars, which they remained until they broke up in 1970. Nearly all their songs were Simon originals, and Kingston describes them with inadvertently comical doggedness. Sample commentary, on —Keep the Customer Satisfied—: —As he wails, —I—m so tired,— we—re aware that, at the same time, Paul Simon was indeed tired.— While the author spoke to a number of good sources, including Garfunkel, her account is heavily weighted with seldom revelatory quotes from previously published interviews. Kingston scrupulously allots the same tenderly useless song-by-song attention to both the non-songwriting Garfunkel’s forgettable solo albums and Simon’s sophisticated, self-penned, hit-packed oeuvre. By the same token, One Trick Pony, the abysmal film Simon wrote and starred in, is treated as politely as Garfunkel’s entirely more reputable acting credits, Catch-22, Carnal Knowledge, and Bad Timing. Kingston trails the pair through their initially triumphant early ’80s reunion concerts and the sessions for the intended Simon and Garfunkel album that became a Simon solo project when the reunion fizzled. Why did that happen? As throughout, the author’s worshipful distance combines with both of her subjects— admirable disdain for airing dirty laundry to produce only the most glancing insights. (8 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: May 29, 1998
ISBN: 0-88064-193-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1998
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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