A disappointingly superficial account of the life of one of popular music’s elder statesmen. Veteran pop-music critic Lydon (Writing and Life, 1995, etc.) follows Charles’s journey from his childhood in Florida, where he lost his brother and mother as well as his sight, by the age of 15, his life at a school for deaf and blind children (where he distinguished himself with both his intelligence and his mischief), and the launch of his professional career in Seattle at age 17. While in Seattle, Charles meets an even younger Quincy Jones and forms an extremely important, lifelong friendship. Lydon chronicles Charles’s juggernaut to fame and his simultaneous descent into heroin addiction in the 1950s and ’60s, through his hibernation during the 1970s, and finally his political appearances singing “America the Beautiful” at party conventions and his jingles in the cola wars. Drug arrests and subsequent litigation form a substantial part of Lydon’s narrative. Finally given an ultimatum by a judge (he could choose prison or his career), Charles kicks his habit. However, as Lydon describes it, alcoholism remains a daily part of Charles’s life, and Lydon is surprisingly blasÇ about the subject, noting that Charles drinks all day long but never showing the musician seeking treatment or even acknowledging that his daily drinking is a problem. Lydon is a facile writer, but his failure to delve into the meatier parts of Charles’s life—particularly his relationships with his wives and children—in any depth is disappointing. Similarly, Charles’s progression to blindness over several years is covered in only a couple of pages. It’s been 20 years since Charles’s autobiography was published; time was ripe for a new look at his life. Ironically, Lydon notes that the autobiography has “only one fully fleshed-out character: Brother Ray”; the same could be said for his own work. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Jan. 11, 1999
ISBN: 1-57322-132-5
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1999
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
PERSPECTIVES
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