Shaffer’s ingratiating hepcat charm saves what could have been just another celebrity’s autobiographical ego trip.
Late Night with David Letterman veteran recalls his storybook rise from strip-club pianist to musical director of the “World’s Most Dangerous Band.”
Shaffer and co-author Ritz (Hound Dog: The Leiber & Stoller Autobiography, 2009, etc.) deliver a passionate, racy account of how the Ontario-born musician’s love for raunchy R&B piano set him on a much different path than his well-to-do lawyer father envisioned. Although Shaffer’s parents were hip partygoers, they were nevertheless products of the patriarchal Eisenhower Age. After reluctantly studying sociology in college while gigging in local bands, Shaffer came to an agreement with his father: If he wasn’t able to make a living from music within a year, then he would attend law school. Armed with a gift for improvisation and a love for cover tunes, Shaffer worked his way through Toronto dive bars and strip clubs and soon landed a gig as keyboardist for the musical Godspell in the early 1970s. His seemingly effortless rise to industry royalty follows a familiar right-place-at-the-right-time narrative. After toiling on a series of minor Broadway projects, Shaffer got a call from an old Toronto buddy, Howard Shore, the musical director for the Saturday Night Live band. Suddenly he became the hit show’s keyboardist and a resident at New York’s romantically gritty rock-star haunt, the Gramercy Hotel. Though the name-dropping comes thick and fast throughout, to his credit Shaffer never completely settles into the easy rhythms of shallow celebrity-driven anecdote. His reminisces of playing alongside the likes of Bob Dylan, Ray Charles, James Brown and other personal heroes are usually witty and reverent—although the out-of-the-blue chapter on his fascination with Jerry Lewis’s telethons is simply bizarre. As with most celebrity memoirs, the most entertaining bits of the author’s personal history are found on the road to success, not at the destination—in fact, his longtime stint at Letterman is barely mentioned.
Shaffer’s ingratiating hepcat charm saves what could have been just another celebrity’s autobiographical ego trip.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-385-52483-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2009
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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