Latest and perhaps best of several recent bios of Josephine Baker (e.g., Phyllis Rose's Jazz Cleopatra, 1989)—this one by the performer's semiadopted/fully discarded son (owner of a Manhattan restaurant named Chez Josephine) and Chase (The Great American Waistline, 1981, etc.). Author Baker—who became the 13th member of Josephine's famous Rainbow Tribe of adopted children from all nations and colors—did all the research here (some 2,000 interviews and 3,000 letters), while Chase put his French into better-than-passable English. That this version of Josephine's life comes closest to the facts, and in no way hides behind a mask of academic research, is undeniable. The story is told by Jean-Claude, who sets the record straight on matters that his mother fibbed about in her several published autobiographies, as well as in the one left unfinished at her death. Josephine had lovers beyond number, which even she admitted, though her split with Jean-Claude came about when a Paris scandal- sheet falsely attributed to him the statement that she'd remarried yet again without benefit of divorce. The authors open with Josephine's colossal smash hit show in Paris at 19, which climaxed with her shamelessly bare-breasted, barbaric dance of seduction to a half-naked savage as she runs her hands all over him. Josephine, we learn, loved her body and spent a lot of time naked among hotel- room mirrors. We follow her through her St. Louis childhood—and her first marriage at 13 and second at 15—to her first big shows on Black Broadway and then to stardom in Paris. Bakermania erupts, her hair jell is a hit, she makes movies. Did she bed Picasso and Charles de Gaulle? Well...she died in bed at age 69, while reading fabulous reviews of her latest farewell appearance. No whitewash but sympathetic and gripping indeed. (Photos—32 pp.—not seen)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-40915-7
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1993
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
PERSPECTIVES
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
