Bowie still deserves a full-dress serious biography, which would benefit from a touch of this book’s reckless spirit.
A lengthy critical tribute to David Bowie’s pop-cultural legacy, with a particular emphasis on his epochal 1970s work.
This book by British musician and longtime pop-music writer Morley (Earthbound, 2013, etc.) is a deliberately disorganized affair. The author opens with long, often shapeless encomiums to the singer’s shape-shifting persona along with first-person gassing about his response to Bowie’s death in early 2016; he’s nearly 80 pages in before he begins delivering conventional biographical information about Bowie’s birth and upbringing. “I blame Bowie,” he writes. “He made me think this way. He made me write this way.” Morley knows his subject well, though, and once he’s settled into a narrative groove, he delivers thoughtful treatments of the earliest stages of Bowie’s career, and he has a knack for finding a rational thread for each of Bowie’s peculiar shifts in the 1960s and ’70s. An early novelty tune, “The Laughing Gnome,” is “Bowie testing all sorts of tolerances”; with his breakthrough 1971 album, “Hunky Dory,” he’s “transcending the fraught categories of male and female”; 1973's “Aladdin Sane” is “the rock album the Rolling Stones would make if they were into Brecht, Brel, Burroughs, and Ballard.” Morley foregrounds Bowie’s art over his biography: he’s less interested in why, for instance, in the ’90s, Bowie sold bonds backed by future royalties or took a role in the cult film Labyrinth than in how such moves fit with a persona afraid to ever look redundant. Morley is too often reflexively approving of everything Bowie did, and sometimes his prose slackens into nonsense (“another centre in a story filled with centres, but one that can be placed at the very centre of those centres”), but his year-by-year race through his subject’s work is often inspired, matching a grasp of history with keen critical assessment.
Bowie still deserves a full-dress serious biography, which would benefit from a touch of this book’s reckless spirit.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5115-6
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 19, 2016
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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