http://scooterchronicles.com/2007/06/... ( )

The grief that the author deals with is a common one. His solution is unique. He has some great adventures along the way, and there are friends who lend support. Ultimately, though, his grief seems to be worked out by finding new love. Or maybe he is able to love when his grief is finally healed? Interesting book either way.

A good read. Some parts tend to drag, but worth checking out. ( )

I came across this book by accident, and up until that point I never even knew that Neil Peart had written several books. Or that he was an inveterate traveller and had gone through a devastating personal time with the deaths of his wife and daughter. The entire lack of celebrity lifestyle with matching headlines seemed unheard of.

I'd enjoyed Rush's music for quite a long time and admired Mr. Peart's talent and skill as a musician but the rest was a blank canvas.

Which now having read this book I wish I could still say.

As a travelogue it is pretty poor stuff. You are presented with a lot of detail about restaurants, motels, expensive hotels, bike dealerships and gas (petrol) stations, food and drink but the landscape descriptions are hasty pastiche writing at best and hideously flowery at worst. Neither of which transports you to the location. Which is more than a shame considering the sheer variety of places he visited.

If you enjoy birdwatching or cross-country motorbiking then you may find elements of these travels appealing. As a lone and grieving traveller he kept to himself. In fact he took pains not to engage with strangers, thus cutting himself off from the other source of travelogue writing: actually talking to people. It also creates the unintentionally hilarious repeated quote about "Stories, stories" which turns into his particular shorthand for saying that he neither has the time or interest to find out about it.

Interspersed with this are rants - lengthy and misanthropic. Mr. Peart's dislikes are, in no particular order: obese people (especially Americans), tour parties and conventioneers at his hotel stops, poor food and lodgings, poor service, slovenly or untidy appearances of other people, caravans (sorry, RV's), water irrigation and its effects on the environment - apart from when it gives him delicious and expensive meals, tree logging, religion and a realm of other things from the trivial to the important.

In a way all this angry ranting is just another method of saying that he's hurt by his loss, but mostly it comes across as a small, spoilt, child crying that "it is so unfair!" This is reinforced with the twee and cringeworthy labels he gives himself, "the other guy" for his memories of pre-family loss, "my little baby soul" for his current state of emotional life, upgraded to "my little chickadee soul" later in the book.

As for healing, well there is little to learn about grief or loss here. Part of the problem is that there is no great self-insight, awareness or acquired wisdom to be gained. It is a great rarity that someone writing of the deaths of family members fails to engage some level of sympathy or understanding. Mr. Peart manages this because what he appears to lack is empathy. He simply cannot see outside of himself.

From the text it is obvious that he had little, if anything, to do with most of the necessary things that people have to deal with when someone dies. Years of being in a successful band gave him access to a management team and paid family members who took care of his home, business, financial and legal matters on his behalf. Although he shows gratitude towards the people picking up these serious obligations it also makes a very good demonstration of his lack of awareness. All the care and attention (even to the point of being provided with credit cards and prescription drugs under an alias) is taken completely as a given. Never do you get the impression that he feels fortunate for having this level of security and help to provide for his wants and needs. In fact in one passage he refutes any thoughts of being "lucky" at all the assistance that his family and money have given him. Such thanklessness diminishes his helpers.

There are many other irritations to this book. Using letters written to friends and family takes up many pages. This method doesn't have to be boring, facile or lazily self-indulgent but he just doesn't have the writing skill to pull it off, so it ends up being all those things. Particularly Mr. Peart's lavish attentions to one friend; a drug importing criminal who happens to be caught and imprisoned during his travels. With a friend like that he hardly needs to be his own worst enemy.

At moments of remembrance of his daughter he is vulnerable to showing a more understandable range of emotion. This is in contrast to what little he says about his wife of twenty odd years. He speaks of her mostly in the first chapter and it is with more than an undercurrent of anger, as though her mental collapse and then her diagnosis with terminal cancer was a betrayal of him. I can't help but think that he wanted to forget about her as quickly as possible because she dared to let him down by not paying attention to his needs more.

Essentially this is a rather embittered book, written in a pedestrian style aspiring to depth and profundity that is not there. A famous person's vanity project. No one would care if not for his life as a musician and, sadly, having read Mr. Peart's "searing honesty" I can only wish that he had spent more time lying.

For anyone searching for genuine honesty, intelligence, self-deprecating wit, humour, opinion and awareness, especially with touring and music making, then go and read Henry Rollins' books like "Get in the van", "Smile, you're traveling" and "Do you come here often?". A far superior writer in every sense. ( )

Love Rush? Well, so do I, but the more I read Neil's writings the less I find to like about him. Yes, he went through some tough stuff, and this is a powerful depiction of the healing journey. Along the way, however, prepare to discover that you, me, and pretty much everybody else is pretty much ruining it all for Peart and the two or three people fortunate enough to be called friends by him.

We shouldn't be surprised that a person who takes himself so seriously writes books in which he is the main topic, the protagontist. It's just a bummer that by expressing interest in the same topic you, fan, become the antagonist. ( )