It would be an overstatement to say that Masekela found grace and redemption through the trumpet—as a bad boy, he wasn’t...
How the South African trumpeter survived his outrageous lifestyle with his liver and brain functions still intact is as miraculous as the sounds his horn makes when he’s in his stride.
Though his debauchery warrants the tone of a confessional—at 17, “my addictions to alcohol and sex were well under way”—Masekela is too bright to leave it at that. He sets his hard-partying life against his growing consciousness of apartheid (he figured Boer women’s scowls simply expressed jealousy because “they had no rhythm, they couldn’t sing or dance, couldn’t play the drums and didn’t know how to laugh”) and his immersion in music at home and abroad. In 1942, three-year-old Hugh was already singing along with American big-band recordings, and when he heard Harry James’s trumpet work in the 1953 film Young Man with a Horn, his life’s course was set. In an unadorned, uninhibited voice, Masekela evokes music’s magical power “to sing our sorrow and illuminate our ecstasy” as he and other black South Africans suffered passbooks, the Bantu Education Act, the immorality laws, and apartheid’s assassins. When he arrived in New York City in 1960, the avant-garde jazz scene was on fire; Dizzy Gillespie sent him down to the Half Note to catch John Coltrane, one of the many Americans who inspired Masekela to create his own fusion sound. He married and divorced too many times to count, created brilliant music for Sarafina!, and toured with Paul Simon; he also became so addled by drugs that family, music, and friends fell away beneath him. On the political front, he reveals his disillusionment upon returning to post-apartheid South Africa and discovering that “we were a long way from freedom and justice”; black government didn’t necessarily equal a better life for Africans.
It would be an overstatement to say that Masekela found grace and redemption through the trumpet—as a bad boy, he wasn’t looking for that—but he sure gave a lot of pleasure.Pub Date: May 11, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-60957-2
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2004
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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