Doc Pomus will always be cool; this book is a drag.
The colorful career of a songwriting master gets woeful treatment.
The saga of Brill Building-era songsmith Doc Pomus received a superior short-form recounting in Ken Emerson’s 2005 book Always Magic in the Air; this tome, which appears to owe a great deal to Emerson’s research, presents Pomus’ story in full-length, infuriatingly “novelistic” style. Born in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood, Jerome Felder was crippled by polio at the age of six; as a teen, he immersed himself in black New York’s R&B and jazz nightlife, and, under the pseudonym Doc Pomus, he forged a career as a Big Joe Turner–styled blues shouter. He went on to pen hits for Turner and Ray Charles; in partnership with young collaborator Mort Shuman, he authored huge successes for talents as diverse as the Drifters, Dion, Elvis Presley and Andy Williams. Halberstadt’s narrative bogs down in the mid-’60s, when Pomus’ career collapsed after a divorce, his split with Shuman and the demise of Tin Pan Alley’s publishing empire following the arrival of Bob Dylan and other singer-songwriters. The story doesn’t regain momentum until its latter stages, when Pomus, after a hard-knocks decade as a professional gambler, returned to eminence co-writing with Dr. John. (Pomus died in 1991.) Halberstadt slathers on the color and presumes to know his subject’s interior life, but the work feels under-reported and emotionally untrue, and he evinces precious little understanding of what made the music tick. Worse, the book is clotted with factual and chronological errors: For instance, Pomus is depicted listening to Billie Holiday’s album Lady in Satin in 1957, a year before its release. And one hopes the publisher corrects the frequent misspellings of songwriting giant Jerry Leiber’s name. Most annoyingly, Pomus’ own voice is largely absent; known as a hipster’s hipster and a Rabelaisian storyteller, he is heard only in a few fascinating journal excerpts. The real Pomus takes a back seat to Halberstadt’s lugubrious, wannabe-hip prose and bogus interior monologizing.
Doc Pomus will always be cool; this book is a drag.Pub Date: Jan. 30, 2007
ISBN: 0-306-81300-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2006
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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