Just the thing for fans of punk—and of its heroines, too.
Guitar hero and world-weary survivor Albertine turns in a thoughtful, delightfully written memoir of the days of punky yore.
The title owes to the author’s long-suffering mother, who lamented, in the glitter-and-glam days that preceded punk, that all her daughter cared about was fashion, rock and lads. As she turns 60, Albertine shows no signs of diminishing interest in any of those things, though she’s decidedly had enough of being told what to do and, more to the point, what girls can’t do: namely, play rock music along with the boys. Having done service for years as the guitarist for The Slits (not her first choice of names, she allows), Albertine, like her erstwhile boyfriend Mick Jones, revels in broad and eclectic musical tastes, but the one-two-three-four blasts of three chords and 1977 clearly command her allegiance. In celebrating that music, Albertine is sometimes bittersweet, for many of her comrades have since fallen, including Ari Up, Poly Styrene and Malcolm McLaren, who’s treated more kindly than in many other accounts. When the music ended, Albertine retreated into a marriage that became loveless and frustrating over its long course; she also survived motherhood and cancer. Throughout it all, she has resisted being told that she can’t do anything she wishes to, including write: “My so-called ‘manager,’ who in all the six months he’s been ‘managing’ me has never once come to one of my gigs, is now telling me that I’m a shit writer and can’t write a book about my own life.” We’re glad to tell the manager that he was wrong about the writing (and should have come to the gigs, too), for Albertine’s book belongs alongside the work of Jon Savage and Caroline Coon as a primary document of an explosive time in British music and British culture generally.
Just the thing for fans of punk—and of its heroines, too.Pub Date: Nov. 25, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-250-06599-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 11, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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
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