Of minor interest to Mr. Wonder’s legion of fans.
Two journalists superficially chronicle the life of musician Stevie Wonder’s mother.
Born in 1932 in Hurtsboro, Alabama, and abandoned shortly thereafter by her unmarried teenage mother, Lula Hardaway was raised by a maternal aunt and uncle. They died when she was about 12 years old; at 13, she made a long train trip to Chicago to live with the father she had never met. Their reunion lasted two weeks. Hardaway next went to stay with a paternal aunt in Indiana, where she was put to work as a seamstress in a local textile mill. Pregnant and unmarried at 14, she was thrown out of the house. Once again she relocated to a relative’s home, this time in Michigan. There, 17-year-old Hardaway met Calvin Judkins, a street hustler in his 50s. They married and quickly had two children; younger son Steveland was born prematurely, and his infant blindness may have been the result of too much oxygen in the incubator. Family life was far from idyllic: Judkins soon began pimping and battering Hardaway. During one such incident, she attacked him with a knife and made her escape to Detroit. At this point (the late 1950s), the narrative virtually abandons Hardaway, and focuses on Wonder’s pivotal relationship with Berry Gordy Jr. and his long association with Motown Records. This story is always engaging, but has been amply covered already: his first big hit (“Fingertips-Pt 2”) in 1963; the influential albums Uptight Everything’s Alright, Innervisions, and the spectacular Songs in the Key of Life; his joyful creation of pop history. Oddly, it ends with Wonder’s triumph at the 1974 Grammy Awards; Love and Brown bring Hardaway’s life story up to date in a two-page epilogue. Although the authors note that her chief motivation in cooperating with this project is to empower other despairing women, they do her a disservice in this shallow biography.
Of minor interest to Mr. Wonder’s legion of fans.Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2002
ISBN: 0-684-86979-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2002
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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