An undemanding yet deeply felt memoir of a life lived through melody, lyrics, and the limelight of hard-won fame.
The driven life of an award-winning, hit-producing singer/songwriter.
Sager’s star-studded memoir begins with her personal recollections of growing up an indulgent “sneak eater” in the shadow of an anxious, pragmatic mother and a beloved father who died of heart failure just as her first hit song, “A Groovy Kind of Love,” ascended the pop charts in 1965. Music grounded the author from a young age as she found herself writing songs as a teenager in the early 1960s, then abandoning a teaching career to write lyrics full time. Sager’s treasury of chart-topping music includes “That’s What Friends Are For,” the Academy Award–winning “Arthur’s Theme,” and the book’s title, from a Neil Simon–created 1978 Broadway musical based on the author’s enchanted relationship with Marvin Hamlisch. Sager writes forthrightly about the irrationality of fears haunting her throughout her adolescence and into adulthood. Afraid of contracting polio in childhood, she grew into a successful woman battling a crippling fear of flying. These anxieties, she admits, “led me to my long-standing relationship with sleeping pills.” However, these hurdles take a back seat to Sager’s true passion for music, which comes through in enlightening chapters spotlighting her songwriting efforts for artists like Bette Midler and Carly Simon and, in later years, with Hamlisch and Burt Bacharach, whom she married in the 1980s and adored enough to endure a series of body enhancement surgeries “to look like I belonged with [him].” Socially, Sager nurtured a friendship with Elizabeth Taylor and, for better or worse, wrote career-reviving music for Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston. While sensitively chronicling her numerous ups and downs, the author is generous in her sharing of the anecdotes behind the music. The narrative is breezy and accessible, with writing that plays to the strengths of her crisp sense of humor, deep attachment to music, and resonant lust for life.
An undemanding yet deeply felt memoir of a life lived through melody, lyrics, and the limelight of hard-won fame.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5326-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
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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