One appreciates the effort taken to set the record straight on matters like the creation of Destiny’s Child and the Beyoncé...
A thorough effort from celebrity biographer Taraborrelli (The Hiltons: The True Story of an American Dynasty, 2014, etc.) that’s long on legwork and short on new insight.
In examining the life and career of the famously private Beyoncé Knowles, the author takes great care to give a voice to anyone with a Beyoncé story to tell. From the women who discovered the future superstar to producers, makeup artists, and relatives of each (including the estranged father of a former band mate), Taraborrelli lets everyone with an anecdote tell it here. The chattiest primary source—no one in Beyoncé’s family participated in the book—is Lyndall Locke, Beyoncé’s first boyfriend. His stories of their relationship, spanning Beyoncé’s preteen years through her early 20s, are clearly oft-told. Taraborrelli uses Locke’s testimony liberally and charitably, but no one gets a more understanding treatment than Mathew Knowles, Beyoncé’s father and former manager. While we learn about drug abuse allegations and potential sex addiction, and though he is more than once compared to Joe Jackson, here, Mathew is a tragic character with a fatal flaw: he simply wanted Beyoncé to succeed above all else. In his acknowledgements, Taraborrelli writes that he was excited to tackle a life’s story full of “surprising twists and turns.” The story, ultimately, is Mathew’s, with Beyoncé in a supporting role in the chronicle of her father’s journey from impoverished child to successful businessman to manager of one of the biggest stars of the 21st century—and his fall from that position.
One appreciates the effort taken to set the record straight on matters like the creation of Destiny’s Child and the Beyoncé brand, and it’s admirable that Taraborrelli would make such an effort to give so many people in Beyoncé’s life credit. Unfortunately, meticulous research and interviews with peripheral players don’t offer much that isn’t already known about the superstar who is a shadowy figure.Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4555-1672-8
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2015
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he...
The latest from French writer/filmmaker Carrère (My Life as a Russian Novel, 2010, etc.) is an awkward but intermittently touching hybrid of novel and autobiography.
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he describes powerfully. Carrère and his partner, Hélène, then return to Paris—and do so with a mutual devotion that's been renewed and deepened by all they've witnessed. Back in France, Hélène's sister Juliette, a magistrate and mother of three small daughters, has suffered a recurrence of the cancer that crippled her in adolescence. After her death, Carrère decides to write an oblique tribute and an investigation into the ravages of grief. He focuses first on Juliette's colleague and intimate friend Étienne, himself an amputee and survivor of childhood cancer, and a man in whose talkativeness and strength Carrère sees parallels to himself ("He liked to talk about himself. It's my way, he said, of talking to and about others, and he remarked astutely that it was my way, too”). Étienne is a perceptive, dignified person and a loyal, loving friend, and Carrère's portrait of him—including an unexpectedly fascinating foray into Étienne and Juliette's chief professional accomplishment, which was to tap the new European courts for help in overturning longtime French precedents that advantaged credit-card companies over small borrowers—is impressive. Less successful is Carrère's account of Juliette's widower, Patrice, an unworldly cartoonist whom he admires for his fortitude but seems to consider something of a simpleton. Now and again, especially in the Étienne sections, Carrère's meditations pay off in fresh, pungent insights, and his account of Juliette's last days and of the aftermath (especially for her daughters) is quietly harrowing.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9261-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
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