A fascinating, unsentimental account of a be-careful-what-you-wish-for romance.
The long-suffering wife of Marvin Gaye (1939-1984) tells the story of her turbulent relationship with the legendary soul singer.
Gaye’s debut memoir, a faithful recollection of life with a difficult superstar, is as frustrating as it is compulsively readable. On one level, it’s yet another tell-all confessional from someone who fell into the trap of loving an artist primarily through the idealized image his work publicly projected. But what separates this memoir from so many other cookie-cutter memoirs about celebrity romances gone wrong is that the author is so deeply in touch with her own flaws and vulnerabilities. A girlhood crush on budding superstar Marvin quickly expanded into something more when she met the soft-spoken musician through a friend of her mother’s, who was Marvin’s producer at the time. Besides the initial offbeat love triangle that the teenage Jan found herself in—Marvin was 33 years old and married to a 51-year-old at the time—she was getting involved with someone who had been the product of a profoundly warped household. After a torrid initial romance with her musical hero, the author found herself in the throes of marriage and motherhood, desperate to keep Marvin’s increasingly flagging attention away from other women. As their relationship progressed to rockier, more adult stages—always accompanied by copious amounts of marijuana and cocaine—her psychological dependence on Marvin only grew, while Marvin’s drug-crazed behavior became increasingly unhinged and unpredictable, right up until he was tragically shot dead in an argument with his father. Gaye's explicitly confessional account of her doomed uphill struggle to stay with Marvin is a prime example of how obsessive celebrity worship can so easily (and dangerously) masquerade as enduring love.
A fascinating, unsentimental account of a be-careful-what-you-wish-for romance.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-213551-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2015
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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