An impressive balance of journalistic objectivity and sympathetic tribute.
Evenhanded biography of the indie-rock chanteuse.
Admirably avoiding either hagiography or hatchet job, Blender editor at large Goodman constructs her judicious nonfiction debut mainly from the input of music-industry scenesters closest to Chan Marshall during her evolution from interestingly awkward up-and-comer to the hot international commodity known as Cat Power. The author especially excels at re-creating the neo-bohemian social milieus that shaped Marshall’s life and early career—specifically her anarchic Southern Age of Aquarius childhood (raised by a mildly schizoid mother and struggling neo-hippie musician father) and her early-1990s struggles as a starving artist in not-yet-gentrified neighborhoods like Cabbagetown in Atlanta and New York City’s Lower East Side. Marshall’s rise to indie-rock scene-queen was sparked by an anti-performance ethos that seduced alt-rock power-brokers like Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore and Gerard Cosloy of Matador Records. By the mid ’90s, her childlike fragility on stage and soul-baring vocals had positioned Cat Power as the most talked-about act on the NYC scene. She combined an irresistible androgyny with intensely personal songs that managed to be as confessional as they were inscrutable. Goodman dexterously tiptoes around any absolutist judgments on whether Marshall’s now-legendary onstage meltdowns were contrived publicity stunts or simply the result of a genuinely shattered psyche; we’re logically led to believe it’s a combination of both. Although the author reveals a deep-seated respect for her subject, she doesn’t let the slippery singer-songwriter off the hook. Detailing Marshall’s near-psychotic episodes, weighing her quietly manipulative nature or describing her 2006 near-suicide attempt, Goodman expresses a polite skepticism that penetrates the haze of press hype and effectively navigates through the artist’s self-mythologizing smokescreens.
An impressive balance of journalistic objectivity and sympathetic tribute.Pub Date: April 7, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-307-39636-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Three Rivers/Crown
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2009
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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