An uninspired but thorough recounting of the life of the once renowned jazz pianist and composer, a “musician’s musician.” Mary Elfrieda Scruggs was born with a caul, a portent of special powers. And indeed, when Mary was four years old, she repeated note for note the song her mother had just been playing on the piano. Williams never stopped playing, hitting the road as a 14-year-old with a group called Hits ‘n Bits, playing split weeks and one-nighters across the Midwest, meeting her first husband, saxophonist John Williams. The road trip lasted for years, reaching its apex during the Depression, when she was part of the now celebrated Kansas City jazz scene, playing with Andy Kirk’s Clouds of Joy and frequenting after-hours clubs—a “jazz Juilliard,” says the author—to listen and jam. Williams’s fortunes were as volatile as those of any (especially any female) jazzman, and Dahl reports them all in sometimes numbing detail. On the upside, Williams wrote and arranged for such notables as Benny Goodman and Duke Ellington, was booked for lengthy gigs at the chic Cafe Society in New York, cut records, and even had her own national fan club for a while. Her sophisticated Zodiac Suite was performed at Carnegie Hall. But she often shot herself in the foot, developing a gambling addiction and turning down opportunities that could have advanced her finances and her career. Eventually converting to Catholicism, she devoted herself to prayer, good works, and writing sacred music. Her last years were spent teaching at Duke University, where she also worked on a history of jazz. Dahl (Stormy Weather, 1989, not reviewed) appends a discography plus comprehensive lists of Williams’s compositions and arrangements and other artists’ recordings of her work. A fact- and quote-packed story, the first full-length overview of Williams’s life, which cries out desperately for more discriminating interpretation. (24 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-40899-1
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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