This memoir of the last year in rapper Tupac Shakur’s life tries to give the inside story but is hampered by the writers— falling into the very trap they set out to disarm. Before entering the world of Death Row—the name of Shakur’s record label, run by the notorious Marion “Suge” Knight—Alexander had escaped the ghettoes of Chicago by serving in the Marines and later as a prison guard in southern California. Maybe partly because of this, he gives a point of view different from the tabloids of the principal figures in the East Coast/West Coast rivalry largely regarded as responsible for fueling the murders of Shakur and rival “Biggie” Smalls. The author genuinely sees Shakur as a human being and wants to separate him from the “thug life” aura that he emanated. Ultimately, though, Alexander fails because he devotes too much attention to the thug. For instance, a whole section of the book is dedicated to Shakur’s exploits with women, most often termed “bitches”: —Salli is a very pretty girl, a complete package. Her hair and skin were the same color of caramel brown, and she had a fine little body.— The disrespect shown for Shakur’s principal “girlfriend” during this time, Kidada Jones, daughter of music-industry superstar Quincy Jones, is astounding. Alexander makes it quite clear that Shakur used her to get to her father and really didn—t care for her (—He wasn—t all up on that girlfriend shit, after all—). The book is too weighed down with guilt over Alexander’s inability to prevent Shakur’s death, a theme endlessly repeated in the closing pages. Finally, Alexander and coauthor Cuda (who also coauthored Ice T’s The Ice Opinion, not reviewed) will leave some readers wrestling with the idiom of the world they are writing about and in which their narrative is couched. (8 pages b&w photos, not seen) (Author tour)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-312-18111-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1998
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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