Journalist Solway (A Dance Against Time, 1994) performs a commendable research mission on behalf of the glamorous, troublesome late ballet star Rudolf Nureyev (1938—93). Though as narrator she’s almost too tenaciously conscientious to do justice to his bottomless flamboyance, the dancer’s less savory side (gay hustlers at midnight; jeweled jockstraps) perhaps speaks for itself. In some ways, the most interesting part of the book concerns Nureyev’s life as a child. Born aboard a Trans-Siberian Express train, he grew up a Tatar, descended from Genghis Khan, in the Bashkir Autonomous Republic, with interruptions and stays in Moscow. War and penury beset his Muslim family: “Potatoes were the only staple.” The deprivations of his early life, and Nureyev’s difficult relationship with his taciturn and tyrannical father, may have bred his successive rebellions. Ballet was the most telling of these. Though he started training late and in some respects never could compensate in his technique for the lost time, Nureyev’s determination and remarkably feral allure onstage carried him through adversity at the Leningrad Ballet School and the Kirov Ballet to his celebrated 1961 defection to the West and subsequent decades of theatrical antiheroism. Not for nothing was The Catcher in the Rye one of his favorite books; “Rudimania” saluted a Holdenesque iconoclast in tights. Solway is dogged and diplomatic in pursuit of him. Though her appraisals of his dancing lack the flourish and authority of an insider critic, she passes equably through the turbulent stages of Nureyev’s career, offering apt secondary portraits of Margot Fonteyn, Erik Bruhn, and others. She is careful never to emphasize the tawdry or pathetic in Nureyev; he emerges as a desperate character who mistrusted banks and every other standard authority, who worked himself into unique extremes of exhaustion, and who failed to win the only real love of his life (Bruhn). So despite a few bandied clichÇs, Solway holds the stage. The sound and the fury, distilled. (32 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Oct. 3, 1998
ISBN: 0-688-12873-4
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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