A timid, uncontroversial look at one of the most controversial, outspoken female musicians in history.
By-the-numbers biography of irascible jazz singer Nina Simone (1933–2003).
Cohodas (Queen: The Life and Music of Dinah Washington, 2004, etc.) culls his research mostly from Simone’s autobiography, newspaper clippings and other secondhand sources, creating a cut-and-paste patchwork that only skims the surface of the singer’s artistic persona and never gives a satisfying sense of the private woman behind the public performer. However, early chapters isolate certain important factors that would have undeniable and increasingly negative repercussions throughout Simone’s 40-plus-year career. As a teenager, the classically trained Simone (formerly Eunice Waymon) was accepted into Juilliard but rejected by the über-prestigious Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. Cohodas mildly suggests that this rejection burned its way into Simone’s subconscious where it partly metamorphosed into lifelong resentment—and thus, a compensatory overinflated sense of self. What began as activist zeal and a positive, healthy sense of racial pride swelled into mean-spirited public racial divisiveness. This behavioral shift took place, ironically, just as she began to find more popular acceptance and financial success after years of struggling in small clubs and racking up anemic album-sales figures. The author’s obvious attempt at a conservatively objective take on Simone’s life is admirable, but Cohodas never deals with why Simone’s increasingly erratic, narcissistic—and often downright unprofessional—behavior onstage never seemed to have significant negative financial consequences or elicit any serious career-damaging backlash. Simone continued to pull in huge fees for her concerts well into her waning years just before her death in 2003. Although Cohodas gives the reader a pleasingly vivid sense of what a typical live performance was like, this is anything but a comprehensive psychological portrait of the offstage Nina Simone.
A timid, uncontroversial look at one of the most controversial, outspoken female musicians in history.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-375-42401-4
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
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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