Uneven, intermittently compelling series of portraits of New Orleans musicians.
As the veteran music critic for the Times-Picayune (and a writer for a New Orleans music monthly before that), Spera would seem to be in a great position to provide a comprehensive narrative concerning the effects of the devastating hurricane on a city with such a musical lifeblood. Yet these 13 profiles, many of which have been expanded from newspaper pieces, might better serve as source material for a more ambitious book. The author plainly has access to subjects who trust him and an appreciation for younger styles of music (metal, hip-hop) that figure more strongly in contemporary New Orleans music than in most books about the city’s musical legacy. But some of the profiles are only tangentially related to Katrina and its aftermath, while too many others fall into a formulaic rhythm: opening anecdote, extended biographical chronology, effects on the subject of the devastation and destruction of Katrina. The chapters on Aaron Neville, Fats Domino, Jazz Fest director Quint Davis and formerly incarcerated rapper Mystikal are particularly pointed and revelatory. The chapter on the late cult icon Alex Chilton, however, is a missed opportunity, in which the author writes about how rare such an interview was and how articulate and intelligent the subject was, but then offers few quotes from that interview. The chapter on a recording session with Jeremy Davenport, a jazz lounge singer and trumpeter who may be well known in New Orleans but little known beyond it, does a fine job capturing the studio interplay but seems out of place given the book’s supposed focus on Katrina. “Katrina changed everyone, at least temporarily,” writes Spera, but his reporting barely scratches the surface of those profound changes. Six years after Katrina, too many of these pieces have a warmed-over feel.
Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-312-55225-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2011
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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