A genial if surface-level glimpse into a brief but critical period of Bowie’s career.
One of David Bowie’s former drummers recalls his brief and occasionally baffling tenure with Ziggy Stardust.
Woodmansey kept the beat for Bowie during his meteoric rise to stardom in the early 1970s, playing on classic albums like “The Man Who Sold the World,” “Hunky Dory,” “Ziggy Stardust,” and “Aladdin Sane.” But he was initially skeptical when he got Bowie’s call to move to London from Yorkshire in northern England, where he’d apprenticed under Bowie guitarist Mick Ronson: Woodmansey had just been offered a stable job as an eyeglass-factory manager, and Bowie was a quirky one-hit wonder (“Space Oddity”) without a clear trajectory. By throwing in his lot with Bowie, Woodmansey hit the glam-rock jackpot, touring the world and honing his craft. However, as his workmanlike memoir shows, it didn’t gain him much insight into the bandleader himself: he recalls being oblivious to Bowie’s growing cocaine use and remembers him as a hands-off frontman who never wanted more than a handful of takes and trusted his sidemen to handle arrangements (only on “Panic in Detroit” did he deliver explicit directions about the drum sound). Woodmansey has some tart complaints about his low wages and sudden firing (on his wedding day, no less) from the Spiders from Mars in 1973. But his memoir is generally absent of bile, as the author prefers to riff on tour pranks, drum technique, and—especially—clothing and makeup, which played a significant role in the group’s rising fame. (The first thing Woodmansey noticed upon meeting Bowie was his clothing.) Hard-core fans might thrill to the minutiae about Bowie’s classic period, but even they might be tempted to tune out the writer’s praise for Scientology and his dry accounting of post-Bowie stints leading the cult band U-Boat, backing Art Garfunkel, and playing in a tribute band to his late meal ticket.
A genial if surface-level glimpse into a brief but critical period of Bowie’s career.Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-11761-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2016
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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