A future country music legend travels with her family from rural America to the ``promised land'' of California, only to find herself embroiled as she grows up in unexpected fame, domestic strife, and teenage pregnancy. The similarity of at least part of this story to The Grapes of Wrath is not lost on journalist Whiteside. Rose's mother, Lula, was, in her way, as determined as Steinbeck's great heroine Ma Joad. She and her husband left Alabama in 1933, walking and hitchhiking to California, with five children in tow. Once there, they found life to be at first little better. It was music that saved them. Rose, born in 1925, was the youngest and from childhood a gifted singer. The iron-willed Lula helped her children form the Maddox Brothers and Rose in 1937, a singing group that enjoyed steady regional (and intermittent national) popularity for 20 years. Following the breakup of the group, Rose, having finally escaped the control of her domineering mother, went on to a successful solo career. Interviewed extensively for this biography, Maddox demonstrates both frankness and true southern charm. She offers salty recollections of her career and her famous contemporaries, including Patsy Cline, who accused her of having more body than talent (``I do not get up there and shake,'' Rose heatedly observes, ``my body keeps time with my singin', is all''), and an enamored Johnny Cash, whom she rebuffed (``And that's when he hired June Carter. . . . You know what happened then''). The record of her life is also a fascinating portrait of the once thriving West Coast country music scene. A somewhat rushed synopsis of the postBritish Invasion years is balanced by a wonderful introduction, a previously unpublished letter about Rose and her brothers written in 1949 by folk giant Woody Guthrie. A solid biography, and a welcome addition to the history of modern American popular music. (50 illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: March 14, 1997
ISBN: 0-8265-1269-0
Page Count: 322
Publisher: Vanderbilt Univ. Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1997
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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