This weighty but incomplete work is a blown opportunity that never succeeds in getting inside a gifted and tragic...
The tempestuous life of a versatile singer gets a detail-heavy if unenlightening full-length treatment.
Dinah Washington has long been a suitable and unjustly neglected subject for a biography: The singer distinguished herself in the R&B, blues, jazz, and pop fields before her death at 39 in 1963. Cohodas (Spinning Blues Into Gold, 2000, etc.) has taken on the task, but she manages to bury her subject under an avalanche of unsifted research. Cohodas has unearthed a prodigious mountain of facts about Washington's life: Few press clippings about the vocalist's 20-year career appear to have gone unperused. The Queen of the Jukeboxes' ascent—from her bow with Lionel Hampton's band in 1943 through her long run as a solo star on Mercury Records, culminating in her major 1959 pop hit “What a Diff'rence a Day Makes”—gets session-by-session, gig-by-gig treatment. However, over the course of more than 450 pages of narrative, the pileup of data, drawn from trade publications, jazz journals, and daily papers, adds up to little more than an unnecessarily minutiae-laden itinerary. If the writer's primary interview sources supplied any illuminating reflections, they prove elusive here. Frustratingly, Cohodas never manages to figure out what made her subject tick. How did teenage gospel-music luminary Ruth Jones become Dinah Washington, a profane, promiscuous, pistol-packing, pill-popping doyenne of all things hip? Why did she marry seven times, often to shiftless and violent men? What abiding unhappiness led to her growing dependence on drugs, which climaxed with her death from an apparently accidental overdose of barbiturates? The reader never finds out. Cohodas is a graceless writer with no feel for the nuances of vocal or instrumental performance. Worse, in her needlessly fussy day-to-day approach, she supplies hardly an iota of intelligent analysis about the singer's creative impulses or internal life.
This weighty but incomplete work is a blown opportunity that never succeeds in getting inside a gifted and tragic performer's head, heart, or soul.Pub Date: Aug. 24, 2004
ISBN: 0-375-42148-3
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2004
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
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