Strangely sad and triumphant—a highly contemplative but all-too-abrupt memoir.
Slate writer Neyfakh explores his complex relationship with an enigmatic underground rapper from Milwaukee who has spent the last decade in near obscurity, endlessly touring and producing a polarizing brand of hybrid hip-hop.
When he was just 15, the author briefly drifted into the otherworldly orbit of a white rapper with the unlikely name of Juiceboxxx. Continually dismissed by many as an inscrutable anomaly skittering somewhere on the outer edges of hip-hop culture, the high-octane artist known for his live performances nevertheless managed to turn the young Neyfakh into a steadfast, although often self-conscious, cheerleader. Fast-forward to New York City more than 10 years later, where Neyfakh—having shelved his own creative aspirations—had another chance to “link up” with Juiceboxxx in a journalistic attempt to figure out what continues to drive him—while also attempting to shed light on his own choices in life. Although these sporadic encounters before another bare-bones Juiceboxxx tour were brief, the themes that the exchanges engendered are broad: when is it time to abandon a dream? Who are you when that dream dies? Does conformity always kill artistic instinct? Nearing "the big 3-0," Neyfakh earnestly ponders these provocative questions and many more without ever hinting that either he or Juiceboxxx is getting any closer to finding the answers. The author's earlier attempts to advance the gospel of Juiceboxxx may have met with limited success, but here he succeeds, painting an intimate portrait of an intriguing and idiosyncratic artist whose inner angst is as sympathetic as it is compelling. The author does his job so well that the chronicle of his time in Juiceboxxx’s off-kilter “Thunder Zone” feels somewhat incomplete and could have benefited from a more developed back story focusing on the misunderstood rapper's earlier days.
Strangely sad and triumphant—a highly contemplative but all-too-abrupt memoir.Pub Date: July 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-61219-446-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Melville House
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2015
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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