Rousing and well-informed, though a bit too impressed with itself.
The late firecracker MC gets his due in a worshipful eulogy.
For a time in the early ’90s, that loose collective of kung-fu–inspired rappers known as the Wu-Tang Clan was pretty much the best thing going in hip-hop, and the most dynamic member of the clan was Russell Jones, aka Ol’ Dirty Bastard, aka Dirt McGirt. In writing the story of ODB’s chaotic life and career, freelance journalist Lowe initially overdoes it, showing herself to be too ardent a fan. A self-described “middle-class Jew who grew up on Madonna and musical theater in West L.A.,” she writes that her interest in ODB’s morphing persona and verbal dexterities “started as a curiosity and as social currency” but later turned into a full-bore obsession. The narrative does a decent job covering ODB’s childhood in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood and his early ascension as part of the Wu-Tang Clan’s revolutionary attack on the music world. Then it becomes as messy as ODB’s life when he spun out of control later in the ’90s, with overlapping story lines about his mental illnesses, addictions and jail time, all spiraling down to his too-early but sadly predictable death from heart failure (later ruled the result of an accidental drug overdose). Although Lowe displays an exemplary knowledge of hip-hop and ODB’s place within it, she also blows her own profile as a fan out of proportion so that, perversely, her subject shades into the background. At times, the middle-class author gets in over her head, as when she criticizes pop-rappers like Will Smith for being “so seriously deaf to street semantics.” However, Lowe’s strong and quite welcome vein of generosity toward her subject is winning in the end, particularly in describing the tragedy of a life that collapsed so spectacularly and so publicly, with few of his fans and enablers doing anything to stop it.
Rousing and well-informed, though a bit too impressed with itself.Pub Date: Dec. 2, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-86547-969-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Faber & Faber/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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