Of interest to aspiring or working DJs, but the mostly tepid stories won’t hold wide appeal.
An autobiography by a veteran female DJ in New York City.
After four decades on air, Miller still works as a DJ at Clear Channel's Q104.3 FM and Sirius/XM radio. In her debut book, she chronicles her entire life, beginning with her 1950s childhood in Fort Bragg, N.C., Brooklyn, N.Y., and suburban Nassau County, where she grew up in a somber household with Jewish parents whose lives had been "tainted by tragedy" stemming from World War II. Music-related memories include being riveted by Elvis's performance on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1956 and attending a Beatles concert in 1964. "The current music was just about my only source for the alien but evidently essential information about socializing,” she writes, “since such things were never spoken about at my house." Miller also discusses her college career at the University of Pennsylvania, where she started working in radio. Subsequently, she worked as a DJ in Philadelphia, and then New York, focusing on classic and progressive rock. An early fan of Bruce Springsteen, Miller describes meeting and/or interviewing celebrities such as Lily Tomlin, Paul and Linda McCartney and Murray Head, as well as briefly dating Steven Tyler. Darker chapters of her personal life include a long-running battle with breast cancer, which followed a doctor's misdiagnosis, a costly divorce and her struggle with uterine cancer. Throughout the book, Miller's voice remains upbeat and energetic, despite the shadow of her family's mysterious health issues. Her enthusiasm for rock ’n’ roll vividly colors her life, if not these pages.
Of interest to aspiring or working DJs, but the mostly tepid stories won’t hold wide appeal.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-06-184524-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2012
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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