Although this book may help others going through the heartbreak of addiction, readers may wonder whether it is helpful to...
Winehouse’s candid memoir of life with her award-winning, bestselling, hugely talented, and desperately troubled daughter, Amy Winehouse (1983-2011).
Fans of the star and her music will snap this book up and read it from cover to cover in a couple of days. It is necessary reading for anyone interested in the stratospheric success of the musician, her publicly played-out drug and alcohol addictions, and her untimely death at the age of 27. The main narrative is sandwiched between a prologue and epilogue, adding to the sense of the drama it contains. This is a story already told from the perspective of her father, Mitch Winehouse, and recounted in various biographies and, recently, in the acclaimed documentary about her, Amy (2015). In the epilogue, the author makes clear that one of the reasons for writing this book, despite Amy asking her not to write such a book, was a desire to bring out the truth. It’s certainly questionable whether this is the whole truth. What this book does provide is the author’s perspective of life with her daughter as she grew up: “Amy was one of those rare people who made an impact. Right from the very beginning, when she was a toddler, she was loud and boisterous and scared and sensitive. She was a bundle of emotions, at times adorable and at times unbearable. All this is consistent with the struggle she went through to overcome the addictions that eventually robbed her of her life.” The author offers some delightful and illuminating moments from her daughter’s life, but it is hard not to wonder whose record is being set straight. Unfortunately, much of the narrative is a depressing account of Amy’s illness and addictions rather than a celebration of her whole life.
Although this book may help others going through the heartbreak of addiction, readers may wonder whether it is helpful to the legacy of Amy Winehouse herself.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-07849-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
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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