A tired and preachy autobiography from one of the first queens of disco. This is the kind of celebrity autobiography that serious readers have come to dread—the ``become famous, hit bottom, find God'' kind. We're told all about Gaynor's ``dark'' past, which included two abortions, drug use, and marital problems, but all this has become rather trite. Gaynor's tendency toward clichÇ is only compounded by the extremely poor detail that is given about any of these experiences. The abortions are mentioned without anything about the discovery of pregnancy; the drug use seems limited completely to marijuana—rather minor in an age in which cocaine and especially crack have taken a much more serious toll. Gaynor is also unable to turn the camera outward, with her analysis of disco music and its impact on popular music in general limited to a few pages. What hampers this autobiography beyond anything else, however, is Gaynor's relentless proselytizing for her newly found Christianity. While normally a reader might feel happy that a person who had suffered had found solace through religion, Gaynor's endless insistence that only through Jesus can one find salvation is egregiously offensive. Even her own brother, one of two of her siblings to join the Nation of Islam, is depicted in the book as being brushed off by her for rejecting Christianity. How this jibes with Gaynor's admission that her own husband is not yet born again is unclear. All of this, on top of the conversations that she claims to regularly have with God (in which the Almighty is an active participant), seems just a little too crackpot for believability. It's ironic that Gaynor states, ``There's been a lot of interest in a seventies revival in recent years''; if there were not, this book might never have been published. (16 pages photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Oct. 27, 1997
ISBN: 0-312-16869-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1997
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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