by Martin Torgoff ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 10, 2017
A textured story of human hope and hopelessness, of artistry that blossomed in the most daunting and, in some cases,...
A comprehensive and compassionate account of the intersections of jazz, race, and drugs in mid-20th-century America.
Journalist Torgoff (Can't Find My Way Home: America in the Great Stoned Age, 1945-2000, 2004, etc.), who has also worked in film production, focuses on a number of iconic characters, including Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, John Coltrane, William Burroughs, Miles Davis, and numerous others, exploring not only their artistry, but also their histories—and difficulties—with addictive drugs. Their stories are more or less familiar to fans of jazz and the Beats, but the author also tells us about Henry J. Anslinger, fierce head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, Herbert Huncke (a lesser-known Beat writer and notorious junkie), Ruby Rosano (a heavy drug user who hung with Holiday), and others. Torgoff is a patent admirer of most of these artists, but sometimes his admiration soars a little too high: in one place, he notes (sans contradiction) that some compared Kerouac’s work to “Proust’s and Melville’s and Shakespeare’s.” The author is interested not just in explication of these often tormented yet astonishing lives, but in highlighting the cultural clashes that accompanied them. The early public disdain for jazz, the fierce and pervasive racism of the era, the demonization of drug users (he mentions some severe penalties for possession), the reluctance of traditional music and literary critics to recognize the value of what was slapping them in the face—these issues lie at the heart of the text, from first page to last. Torgoff’s descriptions of the music are excellent, yet many readers will probably wish for an accompanying CD. Listen and read and weep.
A textured story of human hope and hopelessness, of artistry that blossomed in the most daunting and, in some cases, demeaning circumstances.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-306-82475-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: Nov. 14, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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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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