Wynette’s tortured history is forcefully told, but her essence remains a mystery.
The gory details of the country vocalist’s life.
McDonough (Big Bosoms and Square Jaws: The Biography of Russ Meyer, King of the Sex Film, 2005, etc.), who wrote the bestselling Neil Young biography Shakey (2002), takes on the big-voiced, troubled thrush who logged 20 No. 1 country hits between 1967 and 1976. Born Virginia Wynette Pugh (1942–1998) and raised humbly in rural Red Bay, Ala., she was a headstrong, willful girl who broke out of the honky-tonks and regional radio to notch her first big singles, including the controversial, politically divisive anthem “Stand By Your Man,” under the tutelage of Nashville producer Billy Sherrill. (Music City’s studio milieu and Sherrill’s key role in it are chronicled in a richly detailed early chapter.) Wynette lived through five harrowing marriages, tormented relationships with four children, a multitude of health problems, two debilitating decades of addiction to painkillers and a bizarre, unsolved (and possibly trumped-up) kidnapping. McDonough is clearly smitten with his talented subject—he rhapsodizes over her recordings and pens several cringe-inducing “Dear Tammy” letters—but Wynette remains something of a cipher; one never senses that much existed below the surface besides an abiding neediness. Two of her husbands emerge as the book’s most compelling figures. George Jones, the alcoholic, unpredictable singer who was Wynette’s musical role model and third spouse, is depicted as a deeply flawed yet loving professional and romantic partner. Producer-songwriter George Richey, her fifth husband and Wynette’s manager for 20 years, is painted as a greedy, controlling hillbilly Machiavelli who hastened Wynette’s premature demise in 1998 through a combination of overwork and (illegal) overmedication. McDonough interviewed all but a few of the principals in the story—including the normally reticent Jones—and he gets some wonderful material from peers like Dolly Parton and Loretta Lynn. However, readers may remain uncertain about what animated Wynette’s powerfully performed music.
Wynette’s tortured history is forcefully told, but her essence remains a mystery.Pub Date: March 4, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-670-02153-6
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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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