White, the platinum-selling R&B singer and internationally renowned “guru of love,” brings his satiny style to this rags-to-riches autobiography. Love Unlimited, coauthored by music biographer Eliot (To the Limit: The Untold Story of the Eagles, 1998, etc.), is not just another celebrity memoir. Throughout, White sprinkles bits of his wisdom on love (“If you love someone you must not be afraid to tell them, to show them, to lead them to your heart”) and how to be successful with the opposite sex. Much of his “advice,” written as introductions to each chapter, borders on being cheesy. But the way these digressions stay true to White’s sensitive yet macho musical persona saves them from falling over the edge. In fact, the highest compliment that can be paid to the writing approach here is that often you can almost hear White’s deep voice reading the words. However, the core of the narrative is White’s compelling life story. He talks openly about growing up in South Central Los Angeles—being raised almost exclusively by his mother (he and his father reconciled later in life)—his and his brother Darryl’s early “gang-banging” days, and how music saved him from the fate that would one day tragically befall Darryl. On occasion, such as when White writes of how hearing Elvis Presley’s “It’s Now or Never” transformed him while he was in jail, the tale slips into melodrama. Yet White’s insights on music, particularly how he works in the studio, the artists who influenced him, and the importance he places on it (he refers constantly to “Lady Music” as the one true love of his life), are strong compensation for the sporadic forays into soap opera—ish writing. Love Unlimited is not great literature, but it never intended to be. It is, like its author, honest and from the heart. And, more than anything, it is oh-so-smooth.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-7679-0364-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1999
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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