Fairy-tale vignettes of love and sacrifice, sprawling homes in the Nashville suburbs, and the hardships of raising children on the road riddle the interviews of Mrs. George Jones with Nashville’s most talked-about spouses. Tempered by Jones’s dramatic spin and her polite nosiness, these true tales of southern celebrity claim a certain entertaining starkness—the same (very popular) starkness as country music. Ghostwriter and collaborator Carter’s invisible imprint may have helped to send each wife’s account on a biographical turn; the chapters take a long-term look at these women’s former lives before they became the luckiest women below the Mason-Dixon line. Revealed covertly beneath their stories of marriage, home, family, and fame is the society of Nashville, particularly the clash between music-industry executive thinking and the traditional southern roles of husbands and wives. Jones repeatedly describes how industry pressures often bring pain to the domestic arena. However, these women’s stories are packaged to save the faces of Nashville heroines before the story inside the story is really delivered. In the chapter about Mrs. Billy Ray (Tish) Cyrus, for example, Tish is introduced alone in her bedroom in Kentucky, crying—with her hand outstretched to the television screen. On the screen, far away in Nashville, her husband croons with ’sexuality and mystery,— as if —unattached,— and only at the insistence of his management—which is looking, of course, for the next Elvis, and hopes he may be It. Ultimately, Billy Ray breaks with old management, makes millions, and everyone stops fighting. To top it off, Tish had given up a potential career in modeling to fit Billy Ray’s on-again/off-again tour schedule—and to act as the proudest president ever of the Billy Ray Cyrus fan club. The wives and the author—a wife herself—work hard to bring the Nashville myth to life. Sometimes, despite all the non-secrets unveiled here, the myth even seems genuine. (32 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-06-018270-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1998
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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