A thorough, admiring work that is nonetheless honest about what the author views as Shepard’s late-career decline.
A journalist who has devoted years to Shepard’s life and works debuts with a comprehensive account of the life of the prolific playwright, poet, fiction writer, musician, and more.
Although Winters, who has written for the Boston Globe and numerous other publications, tells us that he’s not writing an extensive description and assessment of Shepard’s work, he does just that. Readers who are not aficionados of Shepard’s work will be surprised by his vast output and range. The story begins in 1964 in Greenwich Village, when Samuel Shepard Rogers (he later dropped the surname) was beginning to see his revolutionary works produced. Then Winters goes back to Shepard’s birth in 1943 and marches steadily forward until the present. Using his unsurpassed knowledge of the various Shepard archives and the contents of his interviews of those involved in Shepard’s life and career, Winters shows us connections between the playwright’s life and works and provides details about his various relationships with women—including the rise and fall and mild rise again of his involvement with actress Jessica Lange. Shepard himself, however, did not participate in the publication. Throughout, the author emphasizes his subject’s prolific output, including plays, film scripts, performances in films, and music, which he frequently has integrated with the texts of his plays. Winters also reveals the extent of Shepard’s friendship with collaborator Joseph Chaikin and his work with Bob Dylan. We don’t learn much about how Shepard works except that, early on, he preferred to work at night and remains computer-less. Winters is generally nonjudgmental, though he does disdain a few works and declares A Lie of the Mind (1985) as Shepard’s greatest. Though not always gracefully written, the book is unquestionably well-informed and -researched.
A thorough, admiring work that is nonetheless honest about what the author views as Shepard’s late-career decline.Pub Date: April 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-61902-708-4
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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