Sometimes charming, sometimes rambling.
Music-soaked memoir from British television personality/music scribe Clayton.
The author loves jazz, blues, rock, soul, the works. He’ll go virtually anywhere in the world for a positive musical experience: a festival in Ireland, a hole-in-the-wall joint in New Delhi, a record store in, well, anywhere. Clayton is an especially obsessive fan of Billie Holiday, an artist who arguably melded jazz and blues better than anybody; he named his daughter after the star-crossed singer. Nothing makes the author happier than sitting around with friends and discussing the works of, say, blues legend Big Bill Broonzy. But after daughter Billie is killed in a tragic canoeing accident, he concludes that family is more important than music, which should enhance life, not swamp it. His perfectly readable autobiography lacks the charisma of Nick Hornby’s similarly themed Songbook, or the gravitas of the works of musicologists such as Greil Marcus, Robert Christgau and Nick Tosches. Clayton does have some solid musical knowledge, though, most memorably displayed in the chapter titled “Forty Records You Might Want to Make a Journey To,” which enthusiastically dissects albums by everybody from jazz saxophonist Ben Webster and folkie Buffy Sainte-Marie to punkers-turned-one-hit-wonders Chumbawamba. Unapologetically British from its lexicon to its unfamiliar cultural and geographic references, the book may turn off your average American book-buyer.
Sometimes charming, sometimes rambling.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-901927-33-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Dufour
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2007
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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