An excellent memoir that ends on an encouraging note: “More to come.”
Beautifully written meditations on love, death, family and redemption from the celebrated songwriter.
As the title alludes, this is very much a “portrait of the artist” memoir, in which the author shows not the slightest interest in dishing dirt or settling scores. A country hitmaker who has received considerable critical acclaim, Cash is also a previously published author of the short-story collection Bodies of Water (1996). Yet for some she will always be foremost the daughter of Johnny Cash. Here she leaves no question that the father she knew was quite different than the legend portrayed in the 2005 film, Walk the Line, which she calls “an egregious oversimplification of our family's private pain, writ large and Hollywood-style.” By contrast, intimate vignettes writ small fill this account, which illuminates her close, complicated relationships with both her mother and her father—whom she remembers as “strange, dark, and intensely distracted” when she was the young daughter of a dissolving marriage, yet a pillar of support and inspiration through the majority of her life. The tension at the center of both her career and her memoir is her realization that “I wanted success, certainly, but I wanted it without the merciless exposure of a public life.” Unflinchingly honest and incisive on matters she chooses to address, Cash provides little detail about her marriage to and divorce from country artist Rodney Crowell, whose collaboration with her proved pivotal in the careers of both. A generosity of spirit informs her portraits of friends from decades past, fellow musicians, husband and collaborator John Leventhal and the children who have enriched the life of their mother. Despite the spate of recent deaths she has mourned, and the traumas of brain surgery, miscarriage and a mysterious loss of voice that she recounts in these pages, warmth and humor characterize the resilience of the author's spirit.
An excellent memoir that ends on an encouraging note: “More to come.”Pub Date: Aug. 10, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-670-02196-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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