Not just for Rush fans. What would you do if you lost your entire family to a car crash and cancer all in the space of a few months? This is what Peart did. ( )

This is one of those rare times when I think that a book should not have been published. For one thing, the context in which the book was written means that we gain insight into a person when they are practically at their ugliest.

Plus, towards the end of the book, I began to get the sense that the book was merely published to earn some much needed money, not because it was truly a cathartic process for the writer.

I definitely would not recommend this book to anyone who is not already intimately familiar with Neil Peart and Rush.



( )

Mr. Peart's grief and recovery belonged to him, and I make no judgment about how he survived the ordeal. I am glad he found new love and rekindled his musical career.

The memoir he wrote about his recovery, as art, is flawed. The travelogue flickers between interesting, amusing, and tedious. The internal dialogue about the survival and growth of his "baby soul," while feeling true, rarely provides insight beyond a glimpse at the depth of his pain.

Peart's a better poet than memoirist--the economy of words forced by the structure of a rock song, even his band's epic-length progressive tunes, helps him sift the glittering from the banal (though his lyrics can be clever on the surface without much depth). No doubt his bandmates are sterner editors than he had for Ghost Rider. ( )

A surprisingly intimate look into a very private man, his incredible loss and his handling of the grief, stress and loss and how he picked up the pieces. ( )

(This is an edited version of a review I wrote in 2002, so some parts may seem dated.)

Most of you have probably seen the motivational posters that feature a word like "LEADERSHIP" along with a one-sentence commentary and an inspirational photograph. Those of you who appreciate dark humor will enjoy the takeoffs on these posters that can be found at Despair.com. One of my favorites shows a mountain climber clinging to an icy precipice and has the caption "DOUBT: In the Battle Between You and the World, Bet on the World." Despair.com has about 50 of these, each accompanied by a list of 3 or 4 categories of persons for whom it would be an appropriate gift. The poster "PRETENSION: The Downside of Being Better Than Everyone Else is That People Tend to Assume You're Pretentious" comes with some very specific recommendations, one of which is that it would be "perfect for Neil Peart".

When discussing with various friends the LDS movie "The Testaments", which shows in the Joseph Smith Memorial Building, I usually mention that when I saw it I was distracted by the fact that the chief villain reminded me of "the lead singer of Rush". These friends of varying backgrounds invariably respond "Ah, yes. Geddy Lee." Apparently, I've underestimated the extent to which the members of this band have become cultural icons to people of my generation. Anyway, for those of you who don't already know, Neil Peart is Rush's drummer and lyricist.

Neil's daughter Selena died in a car wreck on August 10, 1997, while driving from her parents' house in Quebec to school at the University of Toronto. His wife Jackie, who was devastated by Selena's death, died on June 29, 1998, apparently of a combination of cancer and a broken heart. Ghost Rider chronicles a little over a year in Neil's life, beginning in August 1998 when he headed out on a 50,000-mile motorcycle trip in an attempt to cope with his losses.

I had read previously that Peart was a disciple of Ayn Rand--a revelation that shouldn't be too startling to those who've paid attention to his lyrics--and I was interested to see how much objectivism/libertarianism/skepticism/atheism was a part of Peart's life in general and how it affected his bereavement in particular.

The first thing to surprise me was on the title page: "The publication of Ghost Rider has been generously supported by the Canada Council, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program." Pursuit of government subsidization of one's writings is not what I expected from a libertarian multimillionaire!

Peart brings up Darwinism on several occasions. Seeking explanations for "the sad fact that most couples do not stay together after losing a child", Neil conjectures that "it might run as deep as the 'selfish genes' rejecting an unsuccessful effort at reproduction" (p. 7). He was "mildly excited" to find the Darwin fish-with-legs decals (satirizing the Jesus fish) on sale in a counterculture bookstore in Moab, Utah, but he decided he didn't want to risk offense to believers by "trumpeting [his] 'non-belief'" by sticking one on his bike (p. 164). He attributes his will to carry on to "pure Darwinism, and the cellular drives to survive and reproduce" (p. 265).

Of his life before the tragic loss of his wife and daughter, Peart says: "I would try to do good, believing in some karmic principle that 'if you do good, you get good.' Well, it ain't true at all" (p. 158). Looking back on the outpouring of support from his friends and family in the wake of these tragedies, Neil says: "You know I used to think, 'Life is great, but people suck,' but now I've had to learn the opposite, 'Life sucks, but *people* are great'" (p. 34.) Neither Neil nor Jackie nor Selena "'got' religion but . . . all understood spirituality", and one way they manifested that spirituality was in appreciating the Catholic churches they encountered in their travels in Mexico (p. 199). On Selena's (2nd posthumous) birthday in 1999, Neil lit two votive candles for her in a cathedral in Zocalo and wept "amid the pious old ladies, tourists, and construction workers" (p. 310).

Peart categorizes himself as a "card-carrying rational-scientific-skeptic" (p. 238) but that doesn't stop him from judging the Nevada UFO sites to be "interesting stuff" (p. 147), and in Venice, California, he receives a tarot card reading that is so accurate it makes his jaw drop (p. 339). Subsequently, he buys an "Idiot's Guide" to tarot cards so that he can do tarot card readings for himself (p. 359). Peart better keep his rational-scientific-skeptic card away from the folks at CSICOP or they'll cut it in two! If there's such a thing as a New Age skeptic, I guess Peart is one.

As a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I was interested to see that there are a number of references to Mormons in Ghost Rider. Just before the police chief arrived at his house to break the news about the death of his daughter, Peart says he was watching a documentary about the Mormon trek west. (Judging by the timing, I'd guess it was "Trail of Hope".) Peart recounts the words of a woman who survived the trek--"The only reason I am alive is because I could not die"--and says those words haunted him for months (p. 7). He knows enough about Mormon culture to know that the owners of many of the pickups with Utah plates he sees in Wendover casino parking lots are called "jack Mormons" (p. 127). While on his bike trip Neil lets his goatee grow untrimmed for several months, and his friends tell him "you look like a Mormon" (p. 294). Each time he passes through Utah, Peart grumbles a little about the "paternalistic" liquor laws but doesn't mention Mormons by name when doing so. His journal entry for October 8, 1999, a day on which he rode from Moab to Boise, reads: "Poor Utah. Growing too fast . . . Used to be so lovely there, and the people so active. Remember days of bicycling around there and noticing every car had a bike rack and/or ski rack. Also tough for them as Mormon majority gets watered down. Others don't necessarily share their hard-working values. Or wish to keep things nice. Neat, clean, and proper." (p. 419)

I was impressed by an account of Peart's encounter with some folks in Idaho. While hiking in the southwest part of the state, Neil says: "I saw a nice-looking young family, father, mother, and two teenage daughters. . . I don't know why I was so taken with this family, but in the few seconds I spoke with them they radiated such openness, friendliness, and health that it melted me inside to look at them. Such a contrast to the bovine trailer-trash the other night in Lewiston, . . . they definitely corrected the balance of my personal scales of humanity. Certainly they 'weighed' less, in several senses, but *counted* for more, as the good ought to do. Their pickup was a few years old; their outdoor clothes were not made of the latest goretex-cordura-kevlar blend, but they were nice to me, and to each other, and I felt a burning pang of envy." (p. 117)

So what did I think of Ghost Rider? It was a little disappointing. Much of the book consists of copies of letters Peart wrote during his journeys, with the majority going to his friend Brutus, who got busted for marijuana smuggling shortly before he was to join Neil on his trip. Neil and Brutus apparently share a weird sense of humor; I guess I'm at least a little glad to learn that I'm not the only one who writes goofy letters. When Neil writes letters to other friends he often, very naturally, covers the same ground he did with Brutus, and so the book is a little repetitive.

I was hoping that Peart might have miraculously been pulled out of his grief by something akin to Christian faith, but, no, Peart always speaks of Selena and Jackie in the past tense or the subjunctive, as if there is no sort of existence that is currently theirs. I guess I would have settled for some substantial psychological insight into grief, sort of a humanist version of C.S. Lewis's A Grief Observed, but it's really not there in Ghost Rider. So, how did Peart end up managing to cope with the loss of his wife and his daughter? He found someone else to fall in love with. This is a happy ending for Neil, but not for me as a reader. ( )