A thoughtful autobiography that takes in not just the tunes, but the times that produced them—a delight for fans.
The legendary Stax artist and composer looks back on a long, fruitful life in music.
“The truth is I was never in it for the money. I loved the people and the music.” So writes Jones, the keyboard wizard who helmed Booker T. & The MG’s, so named for a car one of their producers owned, a group that touched off a revolution in Southern soul music that cleared a path for Otis Redding, Irma Thomas, and dozens of other players. Remarkably, given the time and place, Jones’ band was interracial, with guitarist Steve Cropper and, later, bassist Duck Dunn adding to the mix. The author writes about growing up in a segregated South where it was entirely unexpected that he should know the likes of Dvorak and “Clair de Lune,” music that, along with church gospel, worked its way into compositions such as “Green Onions”—which, as it happens, was born as “Funky Onions” but was renamed for fear that the word would scare off listeners in that benighted time. Jones reflects deeply on matters of race and the many injustices he had to endure. He’s at the top of his form, clearly enjoying the task, when he writes about music, however. One of the book’s many highlights is his mystified childhood realization that while “C was the natural key for the earth, humans, and the universe at large,” other chords had their say, too: B flat for the clarinet, a discovery that “wreaked havoc in my young, developing mind—to find out the C was not really a C, but a B flat in clarinet world.” Fortunately, he overcame his shock to write tunes that shaped the zeitgeist of 1960s pop, such as “Hip Hug-Her” (“the sound…makes it seem like Duck is going to break the string on every note, he pulls it so hard”), and of course “Green Onions,” which countless kids use to learn keyboards.
A thoughtful autobiography that takes in not just the tunes, but the times that produced them—a delight for fans.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-316-48560-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Sept. 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
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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