A fascinating time capsule of a free-wheeling era in American music and society.
A thrilling story of a little-known songwriter and record producer of some of the greatest rhythm and blues hits.
Longtime San Francisco Chronicle music critic Selvin (Smartass: The Music Journalism of Joel Selvin, 2010, etc.) digs with gusto into the tasty history of New York City’s hit-making songwriters, artists and record magnates of the great R&B era of the early 1960s, focusing on one of the greatest, if least sung of the bunch, Bert Berns (1929-1967). A Jewish kid from the Bronx with a heart condition caused by a childhood bout with rheumatic fever, Berns lived as though on borrowed time. As a young man, he fell in love with the Latin music that had made its way from Havana and points south to the nightclubs of New York. Particular favorites of his were “Guantanamera,” the irresistibly catchy Cuban anthem, and “La Bamba,” the Mexican folk song that Ritchie Valens made into a rock ’n’ roll hit. Berns turned to the mambo rhythms and mariachi chords again and again when writing his own songs and producing other artists’ recordings of them—notably “Twist and Shout” for the Isley Brothers and “My Girl Sloopy” with The Vibrations. When the Beatles recorded a worldwide hit with “Twist and Shout” in 1963, Berns’ fortunes were made. In the years leading up to his death, Berns continued to pen and record a string of classics with Solomon Burke, Van Morrison, The Drifters, Neil Diamond and others. But his story is not all sweet. Selvin’s prose, muscular and Runyon-esque and never taking itself too seriously, moves the narrative along from its upbeat start to its sordid denouement at the edges of New York’s gangland.
A fascinating time capsule of a free-wheeling era in American music and society.Pub Date: April 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61902-302-4
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
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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