An engaging look at a now-distant piece of country-music history.
The tempestuous history of country music’s Louvin Brothers, recalled by the younger musical sibling.
Ira and Charlie Louvin were the last of the great harmony duos; in the ’50s they launched a string of songs up the country charts and starred on Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry. Here, Charlie (1927–2011) recounts the twosome’s rise from hardscrabble beginnings in Alabama’s cotton country to national fame. Basically self-taught, the brothers were reared on church singing before they launched an uphill professional career in the ’40s. Louvin maps the pair’s arduous journey through small-town radio gigs and endless regional touring, with flavorful, often profanely sketched observations about the hardships of making it on the road as a rising country act. Major music publisher Fred Rose took the Louvins under his wing, but after a pair of failed record deals, the brothers were ready to pack it in when they were signed to Capitol Records in the early ’50s. Starting in gospel, they reached the top with secular hits like “When I Start Dreaming” and classic albums like Tragic Songs of Life. The second half of the book focuses on reckless elder brother Ira, a pugnacious, womanizing alcoholic whose violence led his third wife to shoot him six times (he survived). In the face of Ira’s escalating madness, Charlie finally broke up the act in the early ’60s, and Ira was killed in a 1965 road accident. Charlie never manages to put his finger on what drove his brother to such heights of destructive behavior, but he still paints a chilling portrait of a brilliant musician intent on self-annihilation. Along the way, he offers entertaining cameo renderings of such stars as Elvis Presley, Roy Acuff, Johnny Cash, Bill Monroe, George Jones and Kris Kristofferson. The self-effacing Louvin dispenses with his solo work and latter-day career revival in a couple of brief chapters. Deep analysis is not his strong suit, but his amusing, prickly voice animates the book.
An engaging look at a now-distant piece of country-music history.Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-06-206903-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: It Books/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2011
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
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
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