A lucid, literate pleasure.
Alternately musical bomb-thrower and contemplator Lydon, aka Johnny Rotten, looks back on a long life of pot-stirring and piss-taking.
This latest installment is of a piece with the author’s earlier Rotten (1994), though some of the caustic anger has given way to a kind of studied resignation. Which is not to say that Lydon isn’t irritated; hence the title and the subtitle, which owes to his suspicion that there’s always someone who aims to enact some kind of censorship: “It’s the kind of ordinance that comes down from people that don’t like to think very hard and aren’t prepared to analyze themselves, just judge others, and are scared of the future.” Some of Lydon’s well-aired hatreds have given way, too, even to a kind of—shudder—toleration: Malcolm McLaren, the entrepreneur behind the Sex Pistols, is no longer the Antichrist but instead just another schmo with an idea: “He really didn’t want to move mountains at all, he wanted to rearrange piles of glitter.” As for Sid Vicious, “dumb as a fucking brush,” well, if there was a punk through and through, it might have been him—though he was a victim of fashion and drugs alike. Lydon delivers a few surprises, not just with his newfound ability to accept the flaws of lesser mortals, but also with his allowance of unexpected likes. Confessing a fondness for Status Quo, Arthur Brown and Can might have pegged one as (gasp!) a hippie. It is clear that, though fond of zingers (he once called Ozzy Osbourne a “senile delinquent”) and political put-downs, Lydon is also a serious and thoughtful artist, bookish and unafraid of hard work, and thus serving as a model citizen in a more ideal republic than ours. Besides, he’s a philosopher: We’re capable of horrible evil, he writes, but “because we are also capable of analyzing that, that is exactly why we’re better.”
A lucid, literate pleasure.Pub Date: April 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-240021-5
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 17, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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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