Although the complexities of Elvis’s character and his place in American culture can’t be entirely explicated with such...
A noted fiction writer (Zigzagging Down a Wild Trail, 2001, etc.) applies a bracing working-class sensibility and a native understanding of Elvis Presley’s southern roots to the familiar tale of his meteoric career.
Penguin Lives are not usually based on primary sources, and Mason acknowledges as her main reference Peter Guralnick’s definitive two-volume biography (Last Train to Memphis, 1994; Careless Love, 1999). She didn’t need to do original research to feel close to the King. Raised on a farm in Kentucky, the author absorbed the same diverse musical influences, from R&B to gospel to opera. “When he emerged with his own startling, idiosyncratic singing style, we recognized its sources,” she recalls. “Elvis was great, so familiar—and he was ours!” It wasn’t just a musical heritage they shared. Mason, who has written about her own feelings of inferiority as a country girl attending the University of Kentucky in Lexington, nails the opposing drives that sent a polite mama’s boy onstage to drive girls wild with his gyrations. “Elvis was born into the mind-set of poverty,” she reminds us: “the deference toward authority and the insolent snarl underlying it.” This instinctive understanding is particularly helpful in addressing the thorny question of Presley’s loyalty to Colonel Parker, whose focus on the fast buck played a major role in his artistic decline. Elvis and his parents knew the Colonel was a con man, Mason believes; they wanted someone unscrupulous to “maneuver among the bankers, lawyers, company executives . . . because they knew the big dudes would just stomp on them.” Her take on Presley’s drug use as a means of suppressing his insecurities is similarly convincing. Readers looking for evocative descriptions of the King’s boundary-smashing music will do better with Greil Marcus’s Mystery Train or Dave Marsh’s Elvis, but Mason’s plain prose and blunt opinions are the perfect vehicles to convey his utterly American life.
Although the complexities of Elvis’s character and his place in American culture can’t be entirely explicated with such brevity, Mason grasps the essentials with perception and passion.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-670-03174-7
Page Count: 188
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2002
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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