The soul singer remains an enigma that not even this incisive biography can unravel.
The dark and mysterious back story of a truly great singer.
Biographer McDonough (Tammy Wynette: Tragic Country Queen, 2010, etc.) specializes in tough cases: his revelatory book Shakey (2002) began as an authorized biography of Neil Young until dogged reporting caused the authorization to be rescinded. Here, there was never an issue of cooperation since there was little chance that Green (b. 1946) would cooperate and even less chance that he would be happy with the results. While the book gives the singer his due as one of the soul giants—largely crediting producer Willie Mitchell with helping the singer find himself—it otherwise depicts him as eccentric and erratic at best, a heartless skinflint to most and perhaps even culpable in the death of a suicidal woman who was one of his countless lovers. Yet McDonough’s final verdict on his subject is that “his life had been so endlessly chaotic and strange” and that “Al remains inscrutable.” Amid astute criticism of the artist’s work, the author does his best to sustain a cohesive narrative and present a coherent subject. Yet the same artist who regularly cheated his musicians and collaborators also showed uncommon generosity toward a drummer who was down on his luck, and the man who seemed motivated by money and ego forsook his pop career for the pulpit after an epiphany at Disneyland. The whole process seems mysterious to McDonough and will likely to readers as well. Was this some sort of career move or a genuine spiritual conversion? How could a man of God continue to be so abusive to women? “You sound like everybody out on the street. I want to hear Al Green,” Mitchell once said to his developing singer, who replied, “I don’t know who Al Green is.”
The soul singer remains an enigma that not even this incisive biography can unravel.Pub Date: Aug. 29, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-306-82267-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
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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