A touching memoir filled with the emotional highs and lows of a deep bond.
Country music legend Lynn shares personal moments about her friendship with Patsy Cline (1932-1963), another musical icon.
Lynn has sold more than 45 million albums worldwide and has earned countless accolades. But as she reveals in this warm memoir, if she hadn’t had the support and friendship of Cline, who died tragically in a plane crash in 1963, her rise to stardom might have been a lot harder to achieve. Lynn was a talented singer and songwriter when she first arrived in Nashville in 1959, but she was naïve in many ways: about show business; men, and husbands in particular; and elements about her own body, such as how to shave her legs or have an orgasm. But thanks to Cline’s forthright advice and tutelage, Lynn was able to navigate it all. She learned how to dress and wear makeup for her performances, how a piece of lingerie could keep her philandering husband at home, and why another woman’s sincere friendship was and is one of the most valuable assets a woman can have. “[Patsy] came into my life and changed everything,” writes the author. “And I know I meant a lot to her, too. She’ll always be a part of me. That’s what real friendships do. We made each other better.” Written in her hearty, straightforward, authentic voice—Lynn is a storyteller and country singer, not necessarily a prose stylist—the author shares an inspiring story of working in Nashville and on stages across the country that’s interwoven with moments spent with Cline where each encouraged the other to keep moving forward toward yet another successful album and achievement. Lynn reveals her sincere, heartfelt emotions throughout the narrative, giving readers a true sense of the depths of their friendship as well as the haunting pain of Cline’s death.
A touching memoir filled with the emotional highs and lows of a deep bond.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5387-0166-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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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