Unsparing tell-all biography of country-music icon Buck Owens (1929–2006).
Although Owens always played up his country-gentleman public image, former Tennessean and Washington Post editor Sisk (Honky-Tonks: Guide to Country Dancin’ and Romancin’, 1995) exposes him as a cutthroat businessman, a dishonest and abusive bandleader and a wife-beating womanizer, among other things. Through in-depth interviews with Owens’s former bandmates, wives, girlfriends and business associates, the author provides a hatchet job with a heart. Sisk posits an all-consuming fear of poverty behind Owens’s take-no-prisoners pursuit of money; however, the author never apologizes for any of her subject’s dirty deeds. Growing up in small-town Texas during the Depression, in the 1950s Owens moved to Bakersfield, Calif., to make it as a guitar picker, inadvertently founding the “Bakersfield” sound, a harder-edged alternative to the syrupy Nashville style. By the early ’60s, there was a worldwide audience for his music—the Beatles even covered his signature song, “Act Naturally.” But as soon as Owens had a modicum of power, writes the author, he abused it. His crack backing band, the Buckaroos, not only served as Owens’s underpaid sidemen but also as his general factotums. He took pleasure in ruining careers and sometimes even had the FBI investigate his rivals. Meanwhile, he slept with thousands of women on the road, mostly while married to one of several wives he abused over the years. Ultimately, the mindless hayseed romp Hee Haw and its decades-long TV syndication confirmed Owens as one of the wealthiest stars in any musical genre. After amassing a fortune of more than $100 million—in addition to music, he built an empire of TV and radio stations and cattle ranches—he retired quietly in the 1980s. Yet Sisk suggests that Owens died a lonely miser who could buy everything except a satisfied mind—the classic Faustian victim of success. A tough but fair portrait of Owens’s three faces: talented musician, genius businessman and despicable creep.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-55652-768-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2010
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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