A book—and a life—unlike any other in rock.
This selectively revealing, insightful memoir casts the cerebral Monkee as a spiritual seeker and self-deprecating visionary.
Popular culture has barely revealed the tip of the iceberg that is Nesmith. The author has a droll, ironic sense of humor, which has helped him connect with like-minded spirits and which readers should find engaging. He’s also an eccentric who describes the aftermath of Monkeedom as “the detritus of a collective dream we were all waking from, each in our own room, and each afflicted with our own case of Celebrity Psychosis informing us about the furniture in that room.” This “Celebrity Psychosis” ultimately figures more heavily in the book than the Monkees do, a demon that haunted him for decades after that 1960s fluke of fame. As much as he resented those who treated him as a puppet or a “pariah…pummeled by opprobrium and ridicule and reviled among my peers,” he eventually came to consider his Monkees experience “a gift, an odd gift to be sure but with a deep message for me that I am still parsing and for which I am never less than thankful.” As for the rest of his fascinating life, Nesmith was raised in Dallas by a single mother, a devout Christian Scientist who became wealthy as the inventor of Liquid Paper. If he didn’t invent country rock, he was there at the beginning, and he did invent the music video and had the vision for what would become MTV. More recently, the author has been involved with virtual reality and received a patent “for the embedding of real time video into a virtual environment.” Along the way, he was influenced by both hippie mystics and a Christian Science teacher, and he bonded with Jack Nicholson, Timothy Leary, Douglas Adams, and John Lennon. Nesmith doesn’t even bother to mention that Linda Ronstadt enjoyed her breakout hit with his “Different Drum” or that the Monkees have experienced a series of comeback reunions (with and without him).
A book—and a life—unlike any other in rock.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-101-90750-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown Archetype
Review Posted Online: Jan. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
PROFILES
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
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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