Ghost Rider: Travels on the Healing Road by Neil Peart
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Book Reviews of Ghost Rider: Travels on the Healing Road
Book Review: Loss
Summary: 5 Stars
Neil Peart writes
"My own personal hell, fittingly, was a bad country song:
My baby died, my wife died, my dog died
And my best friend went to jail
So I'm riding down that long lonesome road"
That sums up his life. Here he was the drummer for a successful rock band, an active man, a good husband, a good father, a respectable and respected member of society, an Officer of the Order of Canada. He did well and he did good.
Then his daughter and only child died in a car crash, and ten months later his wife died of cancer, or as Peart says she committed a long suicide. In order to survive he had a choice: either become a reclusive alcoholic, or just move. He chose to travel across North America on his motorcycle. He criss crossed Canada, the US, and Mexico for over a year in order to heal "his baby soul". His dog got sick and had to be put down while he was away. His best friend was arrested for trafficking in exotic substances and sent to jail.
As he was travelling, Peart kept a journal and sent many letters to friends and relatives, then distilled those into "Ghost Rider".
The book begins with cold and bleak rainy days at the end of summer in Quebec and quickly moves to bleaker weather in British Columbia and Alaska. The roads are difficult but they keep his thoughts off his awful troubles. Anesthesia of the mind gives time for the soul to heal. "D'abord, durer." writes Peart: First of all, endure.
Winter comes and Peart returns to his lake home in Quebec to snow shoe and ski cross country. His baby soul sleeps and heals slowly. Spring arrives without joy bringing a painful birth. By July he notices the sunshine and then a stormy summer romance injects some energy into him. However, she lost interest, he realizes she wasn't the girl he imagined her to be and he lets go of her. Later on, he can function and another romance blooms. By the end, his baby soul is strong again but the healing continues.
I bought this book in 2004 but left it unread until now. I'm glad I did, as it helped me deal with my own losses, very minor in comparison with Peart's. As a casual read or as a travel book, Ghost Rider is repetitive, self-indulgent, drawn out. But one could say the same thing about therapy. An excellent book to read if you need it.
Vincent Poirier, Tokyo
Book Review: Hopefully, You'll Never Meet Your Heroes
Summary: 5 Stars
For years I had been wanting to read 'Ghost Rider', I recalled from the news reports back in '98 how Neil suffered the worst in human tragedies and I was curious to see how he dealt with them. When he decided to share his thoughts I was very intrigued. Certainly there are tragedies everyday, some worse than his, but this was Neil Peart, one of the greatest drummers of all time. I had to know how he felt.
Well after 400+ pages I am sure of one thing: Neil is the quintissential oxymoron. First off, he seems to really not like you or me, despite the fact that our purchases of his records, cassettes, CD's, videos and concert tickets over a 30-year period has bought his BMW RS1100GS and allowed him the 'freedom' to deal with his crisis in a manner of his choosing. Yet he wants to share his thoughts with us almost as if he is so insecure he needs our approval. He claims to disdain anyone overweight or sloven but tells us of his joy in not shaving or cutting his hair occasionally in his transgressions.
Undoubtedly, by way of his passion for Art and Literature, he comes across as being smarter than you and me but the way he says it implies that he is really not sure..."See I'm really smart don't you think?" He wants to be a private person yet he writes a book that peers deep into his soul and then shares it with the rest of us 'common men.' He preaches about all the faults of man yet he conveys these mostly through his letters to his drug smuggling riding buddy who sits in jail for several years.
Basically, I'll bet that he was definitely this screwed up before these terrible tragedies befell him. It just goes to show you that it is best to never your meet your heroes because the reality will always disappoint the fantasy. Now having said that I would definitely recommend this book because I think the travelling and soul searching are of incredible interest to just about everyone.
However, as I continue to enjoy Rush as they complete their fourth decade of existence I hope Neil's path and my path never intersect. The disappontment would be too great for both of us.
Book Review: So you want a glimpse into real loss?
Summary: 5 Stars
Everyone has their own personal response to coping with loss. This book is one man's story of dealing with the death of his only child followed shortly thereafter by his wife. For those of us fortunate enough to not have experienced such tragedy, this book provides some insight into how one might respond. From that standpoint, this book is very personal and provides a pretty honest window into a couple years of Neal Peart's life.
Some reviewers seem to take the author's honesty and demand that it be politically correct. What a pity for them. When one is trying to cling to life and not succumb to their grief and loss, the last thing they, or anyone else, should care about is expressing themselves in a way that won't offend the (in this case, massive) masses. To those thin skinned readers, Get Over It. It's not about you!
This book is definitely worth reading. Few are brave enough to share the raw emotion that surrounds such events. Even fewer have the expressive abilities of Neal Peart and are able to elegantly convey their inner world. The author strikes a reasonable balance between talking about his grieving, and talking about his surroundings as he tries to just get through each day, riding across the landscapes of North America.
If you'd like to better understand how people cope with loss, buy this book. If you're like some other reviewers and seem to think the world should bestow kind words upon gluttony at all times and under all circumstances, get real.
Some reviewers have commented about the difficulty of getting through the "Letters to Brutus" section in the middle of the book. I, too, found that part to evoke some questions about the author's level of effort in writing the book. For a while, it seemed like maybe the author was taking the easy way out by just reprinting a bunch of letters. Upon further reflection though, the author was indeed justified. There is simply no way that what was conveyed in those letters could have been completely captured in any other form; something would have been lost in the translation.
Book Review: The story of a man determined to save his own life.
Summary: 5 Stars
In the interest of full disclosure, I admit to being a long-time Rush fan, which by extension makes me a long-time fan of Neil Peart, the author of this work and drummer and lyricist for Rush. I had been aware of the tragedies that he and his family had experienced, and knew that it was the reason behind the several-year gap between albums (Test for Echo released in 1996. Rush's next album, Vapor Trails, would not release until 2002.). However, I didn't know the story of what brought Neil back to Rush, and thus Rush back to the world until I picked up this book at a concert in July of 2002.When Neil Peart lost his daughter to a traffic accident in the fall of 1997, and his wife to cancer (though, really, he knew it was a broken heart that took his wife), he was an empty man, a man with no reason to live, and little desire to do so. To save himself from the loneliness and the emptiness of a life alone, Peart took to the roads on his motorcycle on a journey that would cover Canada, much of the western United States, and parts of Central America. As he wrote:
"My little baby soul was not a happy infant, of course, with much to complain about, but as every parent learns, a restless baby often calms down if you take it for a ride. I had learned my squalling spirit could be soothed the same way, by motion, and so I had decided to set off on this journey into the unknown. Take my little baby soul for a ride."
This book is a compelling combination of travelogue, literary journal, sarcastic wit, and honest soul- searching. It provides a number of insights to a complex and intriguing man, one who would be interesting even without his fame. His humor, his pain, his reflections, his irritation, his impatience, his fear... All of it presented for the world to see, and to learn from.
I recommend this book not only to Rush fans, but to anyone interested in seeing how someone survives the losses Peart experienced and emerges a whole person on the other side.
Book Review: "the innocence slips away...."
Summary: 5 Stars
As with my other reviews of people's life stories, this should be considered "unrated," as I do not assign numbers to memoirs.I've been surprised at the cold-bloodedness of some of the responses to this book. Yes, it rambles. Yes, it is self-indulgent. Yes, it's a travelogue, some of the detail entirely incidental. And he uses too damned many italics on words that don't merit them. Tra-la.
This book was written by a man who went through tragedy so terrible that in publicity photographs taken afterward, he looks to have aged about twenty-five years in six. He does not, like C. S. Lewis, explain his grieving as a kind of conversion, nor does he go into the depths of it, as Robert Romanyshyn does. And why? Because Mr. Peart is not a novelist or essayist or psychologist: he is the lyricist for the rock band RUSH, and this book is the story of what he did when, deep in grief over his dead daughter, his wife died as well: he got on his motorcycle and rode.
The result is this book, a kind of journal-in-motion. Some will view it as an escape. But with a man like Peart, to ride away from pain too enormous to face all at once is to ride, eventually, toward it, taking it into his soul piece by piece along the way, finding a bit of it here in a rainy day, there in an engine clogged by an accidental dousing of diesel fuel. There is no one-time immersion, no epiphany to the sound of literary trumpets, no: like many a Rush song, it is a gradually growing sense of enlivenment, like that of many an inwardly dead-feeling survivor who learns, a little at a time, to live--and to run, as M. Scott Momaday says of his character Abel, beyond (because through and out the other side of) his pain.
It bears reflection, too, that the former atheistic fan of Ayn Randian individualism learns bit by bit to connect--and when he does, he allows himself to do what so many men lack the courage for: to depend.