One of the better books on the band and welcome reading in this 50th anniversary year.
Righteous testimonial to the anarchic goodness that was the Grateful Dead.
You don’t have to be stoned to listen to the Dead, but it can help. While it’s unclear what Rolling Stone contributing editor Browne’s (Fire and Rain: The Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel, James Taylor, CSNY, and the Lost Story of 1970, 2011, etc.) diet was when writing this book, he is quite clear on the band’s unfortunate trajectory from a little grass here to heroin and speedballs there, with fatal consequences. But while the author doesn’t shy away from the band’s pharmaceutical inventory, neither does he let that get in the way of his assessment of the music, from the early brilliance of their country-tinged psychedelia to evolving jam classics such as “Dark Star,” the likes of which, one fan remarks, surprised the band as well as the audience. Fittingly, half of the book is devoted to the first 10 years of the band. Just as fittingly, the second half takes the Dead from ragged band of hippies to post-’60s corporation—a friendly and groovy corporation but with all the headaches and internal politics of any multinational corporation. Browne misses a few points—the song “Dire Wolf,” for instance, takes its name not from a wolf named Dire but from a Pleistocene critter that once roamed around Marin—and can be a little clunky (“By then some of the Warlocks had already tried the legal, odorless, and colorless hallucinogen discovered by Dr. Albert Hoffmann in Switzerland about three decades before”), but he’s right about most everything. He also appropriately places emphasis on things other biographers have overlooked: the importance to the band’s sound of Robert Hunter as a lyricist and arranger, the incessant intellectual curiosity of Jerry Garcia, and the unerring sense of bad judgment that brought the band to ruin—but also the good luck that allowed it to keep chugging along for so long.
One of the better books on the band and welcome reading in this 50th anniversary year.Pub Date: May 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-306-82170-7
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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
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
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