Those who can’t get enough of the details of Jackson’s death might relish this account, but those who prefer to appreciate...
A tabloid-style exploration of the death of Michael Jackson (1958-2009), particularly the role the singer’s personal physician may have played in his demise.
In their first book, screenwriter and director Richards and music manager Langthorne plod methodically and chronologically through Jackson’s life, pausing to zoom in on his final few days as well as the 83 minutes that passed between the time Jackson’s physician, Conrad Murray, allegedly discovered him unconscious and the time of his arrival at the hospital. The rehash of the singer’s life in the first half of the book treads familiar ground, dutifully recording how high Jackson’s records made it on the Billboard charts, detailing his intake of prescription painkillers, describing the lawsuits filed against the singer, and examining the minutiae of his contracts with his various producers. In the second half of the book, the authors rely heavily on court records from the trial of Murray on the charge of involuntary manslaughter, of which he was convicted. The picture that emerges of Jackson’s last days is sordid and depressing: Murray appears to have been incompetent and distracted, at best, while his patient comes across as “a frail, deeply insecure, vulnerable, unfit, 50-year-old with a chronic addiction to a wide variety of prescription medicines.” The authors raise the question of whether his producers at the time, AEG Live, may have somehow been involved in his death, but they back away from making any firm conclusions. The book’s bibliography is heavy on websites, and the extensive notes often contain material that could have been more gracefully added to the text. While the epigraphs from J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan that head each chapter suggest that the authors may have intended a psychological analysis of their subject, their emphasis is strictly on the facts.
Those who can’t get enough of the details of Jackson’s death might relish this account, but those who prefer to appreciate his music should look elsewhere.Pub Date: June 21, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-10892-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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
PERSPECTIVES
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