A compact and conversant history that makes the story new again, capturing the Rolling Stones in all their Faustian glory.
A funny, personal, and professional history of the Rolling Stones.
The facts are well-known and have been reported ad nauseam: English poor boys (except for Mick Jagger) form blues band, forsake modest ambition for global domination, soar to immortality on the strength of great songs and classic albums, enjoy enough highs (girls, cars, mansions, drugs) to weather the lows (busts, divorce, addiction, death), and are still going at it, a chugging machine as indestructible as it is increasingly irrelevant. So what does longtime journalist and author Cohen (Monsters: The 1985 Chicago Bears and the Wild Heart of Football, 2013, etc.) bring to this sodden, sordid tale? The passion and disappointment of a fan who knows (and reports) the facts but can’t stop cherishing the myth. As a writer for Rolling Stone, Cohen toured with the band and got close to them, and he seems to have read every single book about the subject; by his own admission, he has studied the Stones “as the ancients studied war. It’s my Hemingway, Dickens, Homer.” Cohen weaves together the peak events with a supple sense of the band’s inner dynamic and unbreakable bonds, and he captures their public and private evolution—whether it’s the way producer Andrew Loog Oldham ratcheted up the band’s hoodlum mystique or how Jagger and Keith Richards mapped out a strategy for long-term success, which ultimately meant wresting control from founder Brian Jones, thus setting in motion the latter’s demise. Cohen sees them up close, such as when he describes Richards literally convulsing his way to sobriety, and far. Here is his succinct overview of the band’s 1969 Altamont disaster: “Mick Jagger had long pretended to be the devil. Then one night he threw a party and the real devil showed up.”
A compact and conversant history that makes the story new again, capturing the Rolling Stones in all their Faustian glory.Pub Date: May 10, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8041-7923-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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