Informative and opinionated—a treasure trove for fans of rock music.
A revealing, accessible career overview of two of rock ’n’ roll’s primary architects.
With conversational prose as rhythmic as the music and language in their well-known compositions, Leiber and Stoller continue their creative partnership in this collaborative autobiography. The songwriting giants behind hits like “Hound Dog” “Poison Ivy,” “Yakety Yak” and “Love Potion No. 9” trade remembrances and anecdotes in a call-and-response reflection on their professional and, to a lesser extent, personal lives. Born in Baltimore and Queens, N.Y., respectively, Leiber and Stoller discovered an abiding love for black rhythm-and-blues music as youngsters. Stoller learned structure from legendary pianist James P. Johnson, and Leiber absorbed the street language of the Puerto Rican and African-American kids on his block. The pair met in Los Angeles in 1950 and sold their first song as teenagers. Soon they were writing hits for the Drifters, the Coasters and Ben E. King, among others. In 1952 they penned the multimillion-selling “Hound Dog,” originally recorded by Big Mama Thornton and then popularized by Elvis. Yet the book makes it clear that Leiber and Stoller were never great businessmen. In fact, they don’t seem to mind that they were bilked out of $18,000 by the notoriously crooked Jerry Wexler of Atlantic Records. The authors also recount forgettable experiences with the likes of Colonel Tom Parker and a young, arrogant Phil Spector. As the nature of the industry changed in the mid-’60s, Leiber and Stoller’s attempts to adapt to the new musical climate met with limited success. They reluctantly pay lip service to the world-changing onslaught of Beatlemania—the Fab Four weren’t “funky” enough for Leiber—but they never hit upon why their currency was waning: The biggest rock acts of the day—Dylan, the Beatles and the Stones, to name a few—were self-sufficient hit makers. The reign of the Leiber-and-Stoller–style Brill Building songwriter was all but over by the late ’60s.
Informative and opinionated—a treasure trove for fans of rock music.Pub Date: June 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4165-5938-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2009
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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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