The author ran out of time, leaving plenty of stories untold.
A posthumous memoir that evokes Scott-Heron’s (1949–2011) voice but leaves too many gaps unfilled and questions unanswered.
The distinction between memoir and autobiography is clear in this narrative by the author (Now and Then, 2000, etc.), a once-prolific poet and recording artist who had all but disappeared from the culture for more than a decade, before his revival with 2010’s I’m New Here, a well-received comeback album. At that time, a resurgence of publicity cast light on his hiatus, as his crack addiction and incarceration for cocaine had silenced a voice that had been strong and prophetic, with cuts such as “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” having a profound influence on the most socially conscious hip-hop. A few months later he died. There isn’t a single mention of the artist’s struggles with drugs and the law here, almost nothing from the last decade of his life and only spotty accounts of the 30 years that transpired after his 1980 tour with Stevie Wonder. Oddly enough, that tour and Wonder’s efforts to establish a holiday in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. provide this book with both its focus and its title. There is also plenty about the author’s formative years, after his soccer-playing father left his mother and Scott-Heron was raised by his grandmother in Tennessee, before moving to Manhattan to live with his mother. The author writes with a wit and warmth at odds with what he perceives as his image of “some wild-haired, wild-eyed motherfucker.” He came from a well-educated family, received a postgraduate literary education, became a student militant during the early ’70s and taught writing while establishing the fusion of jazz, groove and spoken word that would prove so influential. Yet his partnership with musical collaborator Brian Jackson ends without explanation, as does his wife’s transition to ex-wife. Of his third child, he writes, “How I became a father again at nearly fifty years old is a story I will save for another time.”
The author ran out of time, leaving plenty of stories untold.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2901-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Nov. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2011
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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