A pop-culture journey to self-realization that makes some intriguing stops before it runs out of gas.
What we talk about when we talk about the Beatles vs. the Stones, Hendrix vs. Clapton, and Biggie vs. Tupac.
In his first book, music critic Hyden makes a whimsical, semiserious, somewhat wearisome personal attempt to plumb famous musical rifts for deeper truths, and he succeeds a little more than half the time. In some cases, the showdown between major acts reveals the assumptions of the audience. Is Oasis the conventional band and Blur the more discerning one, or is Oasis honest and straightforward while Blur struggles under the weight of its own pretentiousness? Is Jimi Hendrix more popular than Eric Clapton because he died young, while the surviving guitar god is doomed to shrink into mediocrity? Hyden also focuses on how musical acts are formed by their struggles and rivals, such as the way Pearl Jam was pushed in new directions by Nirvana. The author makes a fascinating case that Jack White’s famous public loathing for the Black Keys' Dan Auerbach is really about male one-upmanship and that the dustup between Miley Cyrus and Sinead O'Connor represents a generation gap between very different types of rebels, each talking past the other. Unfortunately, Hyden has less to say as the book goes along, and his attempt to make ever more off-the-wall connections becomes desperate, such as when he compares Roger Waters and his estranged band mates in Pink Floyd to Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien; or when he decides the Smashing Pumpkins' Billy Corgan and Pavement's Stephen Malkmus are kind of like Nixon and JFK. There's certainly an autobiographical element to all this, as Hyden tries to squeeze life lessons of maturity from every battle, but he ultimately comes off sounding older rather than wiser. Other rivalries explored include Taylor Swift vs. Kanye West, Toby Keith vs. the Dixie Chicks, and Prince vs. Michael Jackson.
A pop-culture journey to self-realization that makes some intriguing stops before it runs out of gas.Pub Date: May 17, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-316-25915-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Back Bay/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2016
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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