A refreshingly frank and free-spirited memoir from a feminist icon.
The Grammy-winning artist recounts the eventful story of her life as a musician and feminist political activist.
The daughter of an architect mother and an engineer father, DiFranco grew up in 1970s Buffalo as a cheerfully independent misfit who loved horses and poetry. After her brother was hospitalized for psychiatric issues, she shifted her attention to dancing and music. She learned to play guitar from a colorful public school artist-in-residence named Michael and came to realize that music “brought me deeper and deeper into the world” in a way that dancing did not. When her mother left the family, DiFranco followed her but then left to strike out on her own as an emancipated teenager, sleeping in bus stations, gigging with Michael, and working to finish high school early. Then she moved to New York and, at age 18, started selling tapes of what became her eponymous debut album. DiFranco also began a long, complex relationship with Scot Fisher, who helped her manage her newly founded label, Righteous Babe Records. In between playing clubs and festivals at home and abroad, DiFranco took classes at the New School for Social Research, discovered feminism, and began experimenting with bisexual polyamory. Her commitment to left-wing political activism also blossomed, and she engaged in protests against the first Gulf War and American intervention in El Salvador. By the mid-1990s, DiFranco moved out of the hardscrabble underground scene and into the mainstream, which now recognized her as a major talent and successful entrepreneur. Marriage to her sound engineer and tours around the world followed. Yet in the midst of triumph, she still felt “utterly alone.” Like post–9/11 America, she would endure several “years of flailing” along an uncertain path. Interspersed throughout with feminist/political musings and anecdotes about such music legends as Pete Seeger, Prince, and Bob Dylan, DiFranco’s tale celebrates both independent music and an unconventional life daringly lived.
A refreshingly frank and free-spirited memoir from a feminist icon.Pub Date: May 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-7352-2517-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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
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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