Gushing, not to say ecstatic, exercise in groupiespeak, and a sequel to Des Barres's I'm with the Band (1987). Des Barres's follow-up to her days with the rock fabs begins as a rerun but soon settles into the downside of her glory days: adult life, more or less, though the endless name-dropping requires a rock-'n'-roll directory. As the memoir begins, still-unmarried Pamela Miller, introduced on the Today show as ``Queen of the Groupies'' (``Wow. What a twisted and unique legacy. I never know whether to defend myself or take a bow''), is madly in love with drug-and-booze-ridden Michael Des Barres, a ``glitter-glam'' British rock star who has just helped form a new group, which flops. Insecure Mike and moaning Pam fly to jobs on both coasts and hop over to England to see Mike's parents. Pam's own group, Girls Totally Outrageous, folds, but Pam runs about getting film parts (with Sly Stallone in Paradise Alley, among others) and finding entertainment niches for her talents. But ``the magic dust on the Sunset Strip had turned into sticky wads of filthy goop that stuck to the bottom of my platforms.'' Pam and Mike buddy or room with burgeoning greats Don Johnson, Melanie Griffith, Tom Cruise, and others. Throughout, Pam keeps a diary (excerpted occasionally here), and at last marries bombed-out Mike and has a child. Eventually, Mike joins AA, which works for him, and by book's end is a tower of honesty—but not before he begins playing around during early sobriety, leading to an inevitable separation. Meanwhile, Pam lands a big-time rock star (known here only as ``HIM'') and has a yearlong, super-private sex affair ``on this flaming rocket trip to the stratosphere.'' Dumbfoundingly overripe musk, but just right for the right ears. (Photos—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 17, 1992
ISBN: 0-688-09149-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1992
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
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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