This look at the life of one of this century's great personalities eschews meticulousness in its musical analysis in favor of a complete look at the man himself. Biographer Bergreen (As Thousands Cheer: The Life of Irving Berlin, 1990, etc.) follows New Orleans's greatest from cradle to grave, as he travels to St. Louis, Chicago, New York, and Hollywood promoting jazz—the music he helped create. Along the way, we get colorful depictions of Armstrong's introduction to horn playing (he was the bugler at a reform school), the hard-drinking mother who taught him to hold his liquor, and the ``cutting contests''- -horn-playing competitions—in which he competed his entire life. Armstrong's career spanned many decades, and for much of that time he was a tireless performer and a frequent collaborator with other jazz greats, among them Charles Mingus, Earl ``Fatha'' Hines, and late in life, Ella Fitzgerald. As New Orleans jazz gave way first to swing and then to bebop, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and Miles Davis, among other musicians, dismissed Armstrong as old hat. Armstrong outlasted their dismissal, and many later came to value his distinctive, resilient, subtle style. Armstrong knew some shady figures, including his manager Joe Glaser, who fleeced the trumpeter for millions, and gangster Dutch Schultz, whose feud with Al Capone over ``rights'' to Louis forced the musician into exile for fear of his life. The most vivid element here is Armstrong's own words. Despite only a fifth-grade education, Louis was a prolific and talented writer with a flair for metaphor (``In less than two hours I would be broker than the Ten Commandments'') and an almost alarmingly confessional style regarding his sex life and heavy but apparently never abusive use of marijuana. The presence of Armstrong's unique voice turns what might have otherwise been a routine biography into a grand success. (16 pages photos, not seen) (Author tour)
Pub Date: July 4, 1997
ISBN: 0-553-06768-0
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 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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