Given the subject matter and the author, one expects so much more than is delivered.
Santoro (Stir It Up, 1997), who covers jazz and pop music for New York’s Daily News and The Nation, offers the first complete Mingus bio since the jazz legend’s death in 1979.
Mingus was larger than life itself. A big man physically, he was a swaggering tower of musical ingenuity and a mercurial, tempestuous personality. A key figure in post-bop, Mingus was one of the greatest bassists in the history of jazz, a brilliant composer and arranger who built on the innovations of Duke Ellington in his use of large ensembles (and the boppers in his play with form), while investing his music with a theatricality that few other musicians ever even attempt. For a guy who was often regarded as the possessor of a ferocious temper, he also inspired extraordinary loyalty, as Santoro’s book reminds readers. Based on over 100 interviews with friends, family, and colleagues, some of the most telling observations about Mingus come from men like Buddy Collette and Britt Woodman, who knew and loved him from their shared adolescence to his death. Certainly, as Santoro notes at the outset of this volume, Mingus had a “messy, sprawling life,” but a biography shouldn’t recapitulate those qualities and this one, regrettably, does. Santoro seems to think it necessary to recap every meal, every meeting, every rehearsal of Mingus’s life, mistaking exhaustiveness for insight. On the plus side, the author (a skillful music critic and a musician in his own right) is good at putting Mingus’s early years in L.A. in the context of that town’s vibrant, often underrated jazz scene, and its dark history of institutionalized racism. But too much space and time is taken up with canned cultural history that consists of machine-gun torrents of clichés and aperçus, spat out in generalizations that inadvertently obscure the context and chronology of Mingus’s career. And, frankly, there is a lot more of Mingus’s life than of his music in this book, much of it presented with a sort of unhealthy voyeuristic glee.
Given the subject matter and the author, one expects so much more than is delivered.Pub Date: July 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-19-509733-5
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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