An affectionate biography of a woman who in her late 30s finally saw the life she wanted and grabbed it.
The fascinating story of a member of Europe’s banking aristocracy who spent the second half of her life swinging with New York’s jazz aristocracy.
British filmmaker Hannah Rothschild’s print debut is based on a BBC documentary she made about her great-aunt Nica (1913–1988). The book is an engaging mixture of well-researched biography and personal reminiscences about her formidable relatives. A cogent account of the Rothschilds’ rise from Frankfurt’s bleak Jewish ghetto to the international capitals of finance makes palpable the world of privileged confinement Nica inhabited. Born into the English branch, Nica thought she could escape by marrying a glamorous French executive, but he proved as stuffy as her family. After giving birth to five children and narrowly escaping from France during the Nazi occupation, she was a restless diplomat’s wife on her way back to his posting in Mexico when she first heard the music of Thelonious Monk. “I never went home,” she later told her great-niece. She checked into New York’s Stanhope Hotel and was soon driving Monk and other then-unappreciated pioneers of the bebop revolution to gigs in her Rolls Royce. Hannah paints the attachment to Monk (who was married) as devoted friendship rather than an affair, though she also quotes scornful observers who viewed Nica as a rich groupie, an opinion reinforced in 1955 when Charlie Parker died of an overdose in her apartment. Hannah’s account of Nica’s relationships with these often troubled and drug-addicted musicians, which included taking the rap for Monk when Delaware police pulled them over in 1958 and found marijuana in her car, shows her to be a stalwart champion of their music and their civil rights. Hard-drinking, night-clubbing Nica comes across as an eccentric free spirit to equal the artists she idolized.
An affectionate biography of a woman who in her late 30s finally saw the life she wanted and grabbed it.Pub Date: March 19, 2013
ISBN: 978-0307961983
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 25, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2013
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
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
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