For both casual fans and serious aficionados.
Innovator, iconoclast, hipster icon—even today, over a decade since his death, Miles Davis remains one of the most controversial and enigmatic figures in the history of 20th-century music.
Born in 1926, the son of a prosperous dentist, Miles Dewey Davis III was raised in East St. Louis, where he was already playing the trumpet in local dance bands by the time he was a teenager. In addition to being something of a child prodigy, he was a serious student of music and was admitted to Juilliard, although he soon dropped out, finding bebop, a style then beginning to emerge from New York's jazz clubs, more suited to his restless intelligence. After apprenticing with such innovators as Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, he struck out on his own, becoming one of the primary exponents of what became known as “cool” jazz, and his albums, including Birth of the Cool, Kind of Blue, Sketches of Spain, and Bitches Brew, remain among the most popular and influential ever recorded. Davis was a notoriously difficult personality whose relationships with women, other musicians, audiences, and critics were complex and often contentious. Even his death was controversial: officially attributed to a stroke, it was rumored to have been brought on by AIDS, the legacy of a lifetime of on-and-off drug use. Opinions of Davis differ wildly, even among those who knew him, and these divergences, combined with his own tendency toward evasiveness during interviews, makes separating the man from the myth a daunting task. Szwed (Anthropology/Yale; Space Is the Place, 1997) succeeds admirably, however, exploring Davis’s music lucidly and knowledgeably and placing it in a critical and cultural context. His portrait of Davis the man is sympathetic without over-romanticizing the musician’s often troubled life.
For both casual fans and serious aficionados.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-684-85982-3
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2002
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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