A dazzling, richly researched story impeccably told.
A masterful tale of music, social, and economic history.
In 1965, when poet and essayist Wolff (The Names of Birds, 2015, etc.) was 13, he first heard Bob Dylan’s “sound of anger” on the radio. “Like a Rolling Stone” impressed him mightily. He sought out his earlier albums, and on Dylan’s first, there were two original songs. One was “Song to Woody,” which was “the sound of someone looking back in order to tell the truth.” This led the author to find out more about Woody Guthrie and to hear his music. He discovered a great singer/songwriter and political activist. That search then led him to Arlo Guthrie and his album, “Hobo’s Lullaby,” which included one of his father’s songs, “1913 Massacre.” In Calumet, Michigan, mostly striking mine workers, their wives, and children were having a crowded Christmas party in a large hall when someone falsely yelled “Fire!” In the desperate crush to escape, 73 people died. Listening to the song, Wolff realized Dylan had used the very same melody for his song about Guthrie. The pieces were falling into place: “Follow that darkish vein back to find…what? The history of anger. Hope. The truth.” The author takes us on a stunning, riveting journey as we learn about the young Dylan, Woody, Joe Hill, the famous singer/songwriter and union leader, the small town of Calumet, with its copper-mining operations in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, and the unions and miners who were constantly taken advantage of by management and the mine owners. Along the way, Wolff introduces us to Woody’s fellow activist musician Pete Seeger and noted song collector Alan Lomax. He also tells the story of union organizer Ella Reeve “Mother” Bloor, who first told Woody the Calumet story, and Alexander Agassiz, son of the famous scientist, who hired James MacNaughton as the union-busting manager of the Calumet mine in 1901. Wolff’s elegantly intertwined historical drama is consistently revelatory.
A dazzling, richly researched story impeccably told.Pub Date: June 13, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-245169-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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
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