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 quirky wonder of a book.
A Peabody Award–winning NPR science reporter chronicles the life of a turn-of-the-century scientist and how her quest led to significant revelations about the meaning of order, chaos, and her own existence.
Miller began doing research on David Starr Jordan (1851-1931) to understand how he had managed to carry on after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake destroyed his work. A taxonomist who is credited with discovering “a full fifth of fish known to man in his day,” Jordan had amassed an unparalleled collection of ichthyological specimens. Gathering up all the fish he could save, Jordan sewed the nameplates that had been on the destroyed jars directly onto the fish. His perseverance intrigued the author, who also discusses the struggles she underwent after her affair with a woman ended a heterosexual relationship. Born into an upstate New York farm family, Jordan attended Cornell and then became an itinerant scholar and field researcher until he landed at Indiana University, where his first ichthyological collection was destroyed by lightning. In between this catastrophe and others involving family members’ deaths, he reconstructed his collection. Later, he was appointed as the founding president of Stanford, where he evolved into a Machiavellian figure who trampled on colleagues and sang the praises of eugenics. Miller concludes that Jordan displayed the characteristics of someone who relied on “positive illusions” to rebound from disaster and that his stand on eugenics came from a belief in “a divine hierarchy from bacteria to humans that point[ed]…toward better.” Considering recent research that negates biological hierarchies, the author then suggests that Jordan’s beloved taxonomic category—fish—does not exist. Part biography, part science report, and part meditation on how the chaos that caused Miller’s existential misery could also bring self-acceptance and a loving wife, this unique book is an ingenious celebration of diversity and the mysterious order that underlies all existence.
A quirky wonder of a book.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6027-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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