A smart, sober reappraisal of Janis Joplin’s whirlwind life and the hippie moment. Having interviewed scores of Joplin’s intimates, rock critic and historian Echols (Daring to Be Bad, not reviewed) persuades us that the received image of Joplin as a wild, doomed, drunken howler—memorialized in several previous biographies and in the movie The Rose—is wrong only in that it emphasizes Joplin’s iconic extremity of style at the expense of personal and cultural context. In the bleak refinery town of Port Arthur, Tex., Joplin was rejected by her high school and college peers for her ungainly looks and intellectual curiosity; she responded by developing a boisterous beatnik persona, drinking and listening to folk, jazz, and blues with other rebels. Joplin won praise singing at coffeehouses in Austin; made a few forays to San Francisco and New York, where she lived precariously and started taking speed and heroin; and finally, after an unsatisfying year-long attempt at conforming to bun-haired Port Arthur primness, moved again to San Francisco in 1966 as the acid-fueled counterculture was approaching full flower. Joplin joined and galvanized Big Brother and the Holding Company, one of the many semicompetent Haight-Ashbury bands devoted to meandering, out-of-tune jamming. Echols gives a thorough, bracingly unsentimental overview of the scene’s muddleheaded idealism and its rapid commodification and demise. Joplin shot to fame with her histrionic, gut- spilling performances, but mass adoration did not fill her “bottomless pit of neediness—: “No high could compete with her lows, with her conviction that she was worthless.” Her heroin addiction, alcoholism, and tumultuous sexual relationships (with both men and women) were all related to that insecurity, says Echols, but were by no means unique in the curdled post-1967 counterculture. What’s lacking here is Joplin’s music: while Echols’s is a convincing psychological and sociological portrait, we come away with little sense of the substance or quality of her records. (40 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: March 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-8050-5387-5
Page Count: 392
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1999
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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