A profound autobiographical playlist and radically political call to action primarily for Amos fans.
The inimitable musician memorializes her artistic journey through music and activism.
With great conviction, Amos believes “we are all confronting dark forces that aim to divide us as a world, as countries, as people, as artists, as creators.” This book is rooted in motivated political resistance and the preservation of artistic expressionism. As a 40-year veteran of the music industry, the author acknowledges pivotal moments throughout her career and lets her song lyrics shine at the beginning of each chapter. Amos begins with “Gold Dust,” reflecting back on her teenage self and the creative impulses that guided her as a young artist and a rising social and human rights activist. The author discusses how the “weight of processing conflict” fueled the writing of her hit “Little Earthquakes” and how the 2017 song “Bang” was intended to energize advocates of true democracy after Donald Trump’s Muslim ban. Never one to shy away from the controversial, complex, or incendiary, Amos expresses past and present frustrations with record label melodrama and the importance of continuing conversations about sexual abuse, female genital mutilation, government oppression, and attacks on LGBTQ rights worldwide. A section on 9/11 comes into vivid focus when Amos describes an eerie walk through a muted Manhattan as “the drums of war had begun beating." She continues, “as I write these words all these years later, we are still at war—in that very same war.” In addition to her politically charged thoughts, the author reflects poignantly on the end-of-life care and eventual loss of her mother, which occurred while she was writing this book. The concluding chapters address her grief and how she has been processing this absence by manifesting her beloved mother’s influence through prose and music. Though the narrative structure is haphazard, the result, nevertheless, is a dramatically inspired volume of lyrics and legacy presenting Amos as an artist, an activist, and a sharp, thoughtful musician with a commanding voice. One of Kirkus and Rolling Stone’s Best Music Books of 2020.
A profound autobiographical playlist and radically political call to action primarily for Amos fans.Pub Date: May 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-0415-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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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