Timely and significant—a dark look through a dark glass onto the events of 30 years past.
A panoramic view of the events leading up to the infamous murder of John Lennon (1940–1980).
Lennon plainly said that one reason he relocated to New York City was that he could be, if not anonymous, at least left alone there. He didn’t bank on the dozens of die-hard Beatles fans—never Lennon-as-solo-artist fans—who camped out on his doorstep, a few of whom he even befriended while gently encouraging them to get a life. He had had premonitions for years, saying at the height of his Beatles fame, “We’ll either go in a plane [crash] or we’ll be popped off by some loony.” Unfortunately so, and as America’s Most Wanted producer Greenberg (co-author: Perfect Beauty: A Glamorous Socialite, Her Handsome Lover, and Brutal Murder, 2002, etc.) writes, each of the Beatles, and particularly George Harrison, lived in understandable fear of being killed by a deranged admirer. The author’s account is sometimes moment by moment, sometimes a sweeping view of decades, and it often jumps backward and forward in time, occasionally yielding reader whiplash. Yet, in the space of a relatively short book, he ably captures all the right themes, from the hazards of fame to the curious reception of Beatles lyrics among a certain class of fans, who regarded them as life instructions. Greenberg does not shy from remarking on some of Lennon’s less likable features, including his de facto abandonment of son Julian, but neither does he paint Lennon as a monster deserving of comeuppance, in the manner of the loathsome Albert Goldman. The author is also evenhanded in his portrayal of murderer Mark David Chapman, who, of course, has found Jesus in prison and is said to be lobbying for release. However, Greenberg attributes the celebrity-killing meme of the 1980s and beyond—to say nothing of the breakup of Wings—to Chapman’s example, noting also that Chapman liked the Beatles less than he liked Todd Rundgren.
Timely and significant—a dark look through a dark glass onto the events of 30 years past.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-87930-963-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Backbeat Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2010
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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