A well-researched biography in which the subject still remains elusive.
Heavy psychological examination of the life of melancholic indie-rock troubadour Smith.
Published to coincide with the 10th anniversary of Smith’s tragic suicide, “psychobiographer” Schultz (An Emergency in Slow Motion: The Inner Life of Diane Arbus, 2011, etc.), known for his analytical acumen in exposing the inner lives of artists like Truman Capote and Diane Arbus, gives the same head-shrinker treatment to the long-lamented singer/songwriter. Smith is probably best known for his melancholic song “Miss Misery,” used in the Academy Award–winning film Good Will Hunting. Yet he was such an introverted, enigmatic figure that even the hundreds of hours of interviews Schultz conducted with friends, loved ones and acquaintances still barely make a dent into what made Smith tick and what made him ultimately take his own life. The author traces Smith’s troubles ostensibly back to childhood and vague hints of emotional abuse at the hands of his stepfather. Schultz skillfully interprets Smith’s laconic quotes and makes broader interpretations of how his thought processes work. The author ably covers Smith’s childhood growing up in Texas and Portland, Ore., through his high school and Hampshire College years, his initial brushes with midlevel fame in Heatmiser and then his bigger success as a solo artist. In the end, however, Smith’s descent into drug addiction and ever-increasing depression doesn’t seem too far removed from the same morbid sensibility and inability to come to terms with fame that drove Kurt Cobain to suicide. Although Smith can certainly be a sympathetic figure, by the final chapter, readers are no closer to Smith psychologically. What we are left with, however, is the unpleasant fact that he willfully dragged his friends and girlfriends through his own empty existential hell, which isn’t exactly a redeeming quality.
A well-researched biography in which the subject still remains elusive.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-60819-973-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Sept. 8, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
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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