A disquieting but ultimately resilient reflection on the sound and the fury.
One of the most widely read music journalists in the U.K. loses his hearing and very nearly his mind.
Not quite an autobiography, nor a focused memoir of illness, this tragic recollection by prolific rock journalist Coleman examines a lifetime’s worth of choices in the wake of a devastating illness. In his mid-40s, the author experienced a form of tinnitus so severe that he imagined the inside of his skull was occupied by “a tiny monkey playing a tiny pipe organ.” Stricken with sudden neurosensory hearing loss, a maddening syndrome with undiagnosable causes ranging from genetics to stroke, Coleman was understandably grief-stricken, given his profession. He punctuates his journey to his new existence with memories of his old one, the grim upbringing of a boy born in 1960, with many flashbacks focusing on the girl whom he loved from afar. The medical segments are harrowing, as Coleman describes in intimate detail procedures like having steroids injected directly into his inner ear. Early on, he broached the topic of assisted suicide with his wife, who told him, “Don’t you DARE talk to me like that.” The teenage autobiographical segments are readable but unremarkable, but Coleman’s self-examination of his identity via music and his new interpretation of it are thoughtful and complex, recalling something of David Byrne’s rich How Music Works (2012). “What was really interesting was that, as I sat there shuddering and trickling, I began to hear the music better,” he writes. “Melody, metre, a little bit of timbre, the puffiest cloud of harmony. Yes, yes: that’s a trombone all right, not just a note. And I began to sense the tiniest swelling of architectural form in my head. You wouldn’t have called it the Taj Mahal, but equally, this was no papery squiggle.”
A disquieting but ultimately resilient reflection on the sound and the fury.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-61902-185-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
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 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
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