A posthumous sliver of autobiography from one of the heroes of '50s jazz. Although Baker, a brilliantly laid-back trumpeter and vacantly compelling vocalist, was at the forefront of the ``cool'' jazz movement, his career foundered early because of his heroin addiction and hapless propensity for getting into hot water. His memoir glides from childhood through his entry into the thriving West Coast jazz scene and the busy years of his first success. Baker grew up poor in Oklahoma and L.A., dropping out of high school at age 16 to join the army. He played in the army band (``Since there wasn't anything alcoholic to drink, some of the guys mixed Aqua Velva with fruit juice''), then got himself discharged in order to concentrate on playing jazz. He jammed with Dexter Gordon, served a stint as Charlie Parker's sideman, achieved widespread notice in Gerry Mulligan's combo, and was jailed more than once for drug use. Baker notes with bleak cheer the first time he tried pot: ``I loved it, and continued to smoke grass for the next eight years, until I began chipping and finally got strung out on stuff. I enjoyed heroin very much, and used it almost continually, in one form or another, for the next twenty years.'' Later, deep in junkiedom, he confides, ``I traveled to Munich . . . and got in some trouble. I wasn't prosecuted, but they did hold me for three weeks.'' At such moments, Baker's near-apathy, muffled humor, and refusal to emote seem like a perfect prose analogue to his chillingly affectless singing style. The memoir peters out in 1963, by which time Baker (who died in 1988) was working precariously in Europe. Even when discussing his peak years, Baker concentrates more on drug busts than music. Still, this is a morbidly fascinating window onto his hobbled genius.
Pub Date: Nov. 26, 1997
ISBN: 0-312-16797-0
Page Count: 128
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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