Largely useless as biography, musical analysis or gossip, this flavorless warm-fuzzy seems like a book Lennon would have...
Imagine a John Lennon tribute that doesn’t serve as a mild sedative.
Because this one, edited by Lennon’s widow, Ono, takes the same wearisome, anodyne tack as the plethora of Lennon-eulogizing sundries that have accumulated in the years since his death. The majority of the entries, many from warmed-over celebrities such as Bono, Elton John and Carly Simon, follow a maddeningly predictable template in which the contributor notes Lennon’s sharp wit, remembers a small personal kindness and wistfully suggests that we could sure use a guy like him today. A significant number of these reminiscences have been cut-and-pasted from old interviews, giving the book a somewhat shoddy, opportunistic feel. Many respondents are compelled to rhapsodize over Lennon’s peace anthem, “Imagine”—presumably its cozy utopian homilies are worthier of consideration than audacious, disturbing works like “A Day in the Life” or “I Am the Walrus” that made Lennon worth talking about in the first place. Some pieces are worthwhile: A cousin of Lennon amusingly recounts Lennon’s horror of physical labor; session musician Andy Newmark gives a revealing account of Lennon’s demeanor in the recording studio; musician and artist Klaus Voorman touchingly describes and illustrates Lennon’s “house husband” phase; and activist Tom Hayden provides a useful summary of the Nixon administration’s role in Lennon’s immigration problems. In an unintentional high point illustrating the collection’s general pointlessness, Ray Charles hilariously praises Lennon and the Beatles’ musical genius with a list of songs written by Paul McCartney. Speaking of the Cute One, he and Ringo are conspicuously absent, perhaps to make space for Paul Reiser.
Largely useless as biography, musical analysis or gossip, this flavorless warm-fuzzy seems like a book Lennon would have shunned. The sort of thing a well meaning grandmother might pick up in an airport gift shop for her little Jeremy, who likes the rock music.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-059455-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: HarperEntertainment
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2005
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.
