“Above all, the Carters proved that simple songs about the lives of ordinary people can be as beautiful, as profound, and as...
An investigative biography of the Carters, the legendary bluegrass/country music family, from documentary filmmaker Zwonitzer.
With little original source material to work from, Zwonitzer did plenty of ferreting to discover the influences of the original Carter Family—A.P., Sara, and Maybelle—who 75 years ago put their voices onto wax cylinders and left them to be remastered forever. With their unforgettable harmonizing and scratch guitar work on such songs as “Wildwood Flower” and “Let the Circle Be Unbroken,” the Carters’ music influenced later singers from Woody Guthrie and Elvis to Joan Baez and Bob Dylan. But Zwonitzer also tracks musical influences on the Carters, from white southern gospel to Appalachian balladry, including descriptions of how A.P. scared up songs from the family’s poor hill country—from “remote hollows, tenant farms, mining camps, [and] big-city factories,” not to mention how they created wholly new material—songs of love, longing, hurt, loss, and suffering. Never soupy, always clear-eyed, the Carters offered a balm to the woes of the Great Depression with songs like “Keep On the Sunny Side.” Zwonitzer makes clear that they were no ham hillbilly act but just regular people, a family, though much of the story here is about the unraveling of that family and the reasons behind A.P. and Sara’s divorce and subsequent withdrawal from performing. Mother Maybelle kept at it, with her daughters, in the new Carter Family, and Zwonitzer charts their work here too, and their personal relations with artists like Hank Snow, Flatt and Scruggs, and Johnny Cash. He sheds light on the music industry’s financial skullduggeries, and there’s a greatly entertaining chapter on Texas radio station XERA, where the Carters were regulars, and on its owner “Doctor” Brinkley, purveyor of snake oil and sundry remedies.
“Above all, the Carters proved that simple songs about the lives of ordinary people can be as beautiful, as profound, and as lasting as music studied in conservatories.” Amen.Pub Date: July 10, 2002
ISBN: 0-684-85763-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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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