Idolatrous biography of famed jazz-pop pianist/composer/bandleader Brubeck, with analysis of his recordings and compositions. Brubeck was born in the foothills of California's Sierra mountains; his father was a cowhand, his mother a classical pianist with a taste for the arts. Showing musical skill from an early age, Brubeck began performing as a dance-band pianist in his teens. After serving in WW II (primarily as an entertainer), he studied with modern composer Darius Milhaud. Brubeck showed an early interest in both polytonality and polyrhythms. He formed an octet to perform his experimental combination of jazz and modern classical music, but also worked in several trios to pay the rent. In the early '50s, he was one of the founders of the West Coast jazz label Fantasy and began recording. His performances on college campuses were most influential, bringing the new school of educated jazz to a young, enthusiastic audience. His most famous quartet lasted from the mid-'50s to the late '60s; this group recorded Brubeck's best-known tunes, including the ever-popular ``Take Five,'' from the famous album Time Out that sought to expand the jazz vocabulary to include unusual rhythms. After the group disbanded in 1967, Brubeck performed with his sons, who took his music in a more jazz-rock fusion direction. Of late, Brubeck has been less active, although the book takes his work up to date. This chatty biography by Hall, who produces a syndicated jazz radio show, does not always follow a straight chronological path, and it's marred by occasional repetitions. He is obviously a fan, and his writing, while colorful, tends toward hyperbole, for instance, comparing the quality of Brubeck's rather thin classical output to the work of Charles Ives, Leonard Bernstein, and Aaron Copland. Nevertheless, a good primer for the reader interested in Brubeck, his music, and his times. (49 illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 1-55728-404-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1995
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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