Minus any illuminating self-exploration, Womack’s saga is a fitfully colorful but ultimately empty and depressing tale of a...
The life and extreme times of a well-traveled soul man.
It’s tough to top the sensational first chapter of soul singer and songwriter Womack’s autobiography, in which his wife—widow of the late Sam Cooke, whom he married less than four months after the singer’s shooting death—attempts to kill him after she discovers him sleeping with his stepdaughter. In fact, it’s all downhill from there in this perplexing book, first published in the U.K. in 2006. Womack’s life was certainly not without incident. Raised in Cleveland in a gospel-singing family, he rose to fame as Cooke’s protégé in the Valentinos, whose ’60s hits included “It’s All Over Now,” which became a breakthrough cover for the Rolling Stones. After playing guitar in Ray Charles’ band and crafting hits for Wilson Pickett, Womack stepped out on his own, creating the bestselling albums Communication, Understanding and The Poet. His career, which also encompassed encounters with Janis Joplin (on the last night of her life), the Stones and the Faces, takes a backseat to stories of drug abuse (in the company of such notorious figures as Ike Turner and Sly Stone), drinking and womanizing. Along the way, he recounts the breakup of two marriages, the murder of a brother, the deaths of two sons and the jailing of a third. It’s frustrating reading, for Womack and collaborator Robert Ashton present his hair-raising and outrageous stories matter-of-factly, with little analysis of the character flaws that laid him so low in life; adversity has evidently taught him nothing. His chronology is frequently garbled; facts and names are scrambled; and the narrative takes enormous leaps. Some stories appear embroidered or simply implausible: For instance, Womack devotes several pages to Cooke’s purported decision to not release “A Change is Gonna Come,” while the song actually appeared on an album six months before the singer’s death.
Minus any illuminating self-exploration, Womack’s saga is a fitfully colorful but ultimately empty and depressing tale of a misspent musical life.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-84454-148-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: John Blake/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2007
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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