A worthy postmortem tribute that admirably avoids both easy sensationalism and knee-jerk sentimentalism.
A sympathetic revisiting of the King of Pop's rich musical legacy.
In 1983, writes noted music critic and memoirist George (City Kid: A Writer's Memoir of Ghetto Life and Post-Soul Success, 2009, etc.), “Dell published my first book, The Michael Jackson Story, a pocket-sized quickie biography of the singer” that capitalized on his unprecedented success. Fittingly, the author now offers this reverent—but not wholly uncritical—blend of memoir, music journalism and pop sociology to commemorate the untimely death of the controversial but immensely gifted pop icon. George traces his own memories of the Jackson 5 and Michael Jackson's solo career, both as a live act and through the recordings, while growing up in ’70s Brooklyn. He depicts the rise of the Jackson family from working-class Gary, Ind., as partly stemming from patriarch Joe Jackson's own frustrated ambitions as a musician. George expertly examines important turning points in Jackson's career, including the profound influence of disco (Saturday Night Fever, especially) on his work, leading to the smash album Off the Wall in 1979, which set the stage for the paradigm-shifting 1982 breakthrough, Thriller. That album's barrier-breaking influence opened doors for not only black performers but African-Americans as a whole. (George posits the success of Thriller as a catalyst for the rise to power of Oprah, and even Barack Obama.) The author helpfully acknowledges the behind-the-scenes session players and producers who kept the Jackson juggernaut rolling for so long—most importantly, Thriller mastermind Quincy Jones. But George also considers the downside of Thriller's runaway success. Jackson's newly inflated commercial ambitions, among other things, led to the infamous Pepsi ad rehearsal during which the performer's hair caught fire, an incident that may have begun his longtime addiction to painkillers. Sadly, the post-Thriller era ushered in the weirdly “eccentric” side of Jackson, which ultimately led to bad business deals, failed marriages and ignominious sex scandals.
A worthy postmortem tribute that admirably avoids both easy sensationalism and knee-jerk sentimentalism.Pub Date: June 8, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-306-81878-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: Jan. 23, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2010
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
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
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