A rare glimpse into the color guard lifestyle with personal touches that rescue the book from becoming pure pageantry.
Chandler’s debut memoir takes readers behind the scenes of the little-understood world of color guard.
The author’s story begins in a small Southern town, where his classmates routinely bullied him with a “constant barrage” of homophobic slurs. The author’s passion for performance, though, helped him flower, and after he watched a marching band on television, he was inspired by its precision and power. He learned the trombone and soon became heavily involved in the college color guard. As Chandler describes becoming a director and eventually leading his corps to several championships, it’s evident that he’s very good at what he does. He frames his narrative with an anecdote about the musical TV show Glee, whose producers hired him to choreograph a scene: “Here I was, a part of bringing color guard to a musical television show about a group of kids who were alienated as outsiders in high school.” He later met Stanley Knaub, a renowned choreographer, who playfully called Chandler the “Pixie from Dixie.” Color guard is an art form that requires a lot of discipline, and Chandler offers a surprisingly candid perspective on it: “It’s all show business….There’s an audience that has paid good money to come and see you and you have something to communicate.” This book is an all-encompassing autobiography, narrating the full arc of the author’s life and work. The prose style can be dry and uneven. At its best, though, it has the glossy, appreciative tone of a commencement speech, offering an equal mix of sweet anecdotes and life lessons. In a late chapter, “Putting it Together,” the story transforms into a manifesto about the creative process, and the next, “Dear Performers…,” is an open letter to his mentees. Although Chandler writes that he didn’t know how to finish the book, his finale is particularly sentimental. Alienated youths with a creative streak will likely find inspiration in this story.
A rare glimpse into the color guard lifestyle with personal touches that rescue the book from becoming pure pageantry.Pub Date: June 11, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5119-6033-5
Page Count: 242
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 24, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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