A lush and often lyrical valentine to an extraordinarily talented and complicated artist.
Biographer and film historian Bogle (Bright Boulevards, Bold Dreams: The Story of Black Hollywood, 2005, etc.) returns with an encyclopedic life of Ethel Waters (1896–1977), singer, actress and trailblazer.
The author leaves few stones unturned in this massive but often mesmerizing work. Virtually every character earns at least a paragraph or two of back story, including all backup singers and sidemen on Waters’ recordings and nightclub appearances. Bogle tracks his subject’s life precisely and carefully. As the text progresses, it becomes more and more evident that Waters has so enthralled Bogle that he operates almost like her posthumous press agent. He begins in 1950 as the aging, overweight Waters, her career on a downturn, waits to go out for her first scene in A Member of the Wedding, the role that turned the ignition key for the second major surge of her career (it led to numerous TV and film appearances). Bogle then shifts to Chester, Penn., Waters’ birthplace, and the incredible story commences. Waters’ rise to stardom is a classic rags-to-riches story. She was a frail yet sexy young woman (known in nightclubs as “Sweet Mama Stringbean”) with a voice that, in the author’s view, changed popular music. The author tells us about her heroes (Ma Rainey principal among them), her rivals (whom she often treated ferociously) and her successors (Lena Horne was not a fan). Bogle also frequently defends Waters, who was irascible backstage, on film and TV sets; he finds cultural and biographical explanations, but she was a handful. The author deals delicately with her sexual interests, which included both genders.
A lush and often lyrical valentine to an extraordinarily talented and complicated artist.Pub Date: Feb. 8, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-06-124173-4
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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