To borrow one of the author’s overused transitions, “to make a long story short,” stick with the master’s music and steer...
The venerated Cuban jazz saxophonist produces a rambling rendition of his life that is far from pitch-perfect.
D’Rivera begins with Webster’s definition of “book,” but he would have fared better to find the meaning of “memoir.” D’Rivera’s story reads like a scrapbook, replete with travelogue accounts of his concerts abroad, random black-and-white photos (one of him and Dizzy Gillespie in a sauna in Helsinki in the middle of a chapter about Madrid) and caricature sketches (by him, by his mother, by his friends) of Fidel Castro, of himself, of the Chinese-American cellist Yo-Yo Ma. At times it appears that since D’Rivera’s 1980 defection from Cuba (to New York via Madrid), this self-proclaimed “raging anti-Communist” has made a side career of collecting and writing snarky op-ed pieces about anyone—from actor Danny Glover to bass player Charlie Haden—who dares to visit Cuba and not denounce Castro. While D’Rivera’s anger does have a basis—he was involved in a nine-year legal battle to bring his wife and son over from Cuba and, while still on the island, his music was sometimes censored—his vitriolic classification of those who don’t share his views, political or otherwise, as “idiots” and “assholes,” is hard to take. Tiresome too are D’Rivera’s machista descriptions of women (he likes Venezuelans because they are good cooks and all the ugly ones have probably been sent to Mongolia), his sexual puns and his surplus of scatological humor. Toward the end, D’Rivera tells us that Cubans are, by nature, contradictory characters, a point already proven by his sudden switches between resentment and reverence in his extended acknowledgment-like passages to his friends and in their reprinted testimonial letters touting D’Rivera’s talent.
To borrow one of the author’s overused transitions, “to make a long story short,” stick with the master’s music and steer clear of this book.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2005
ISBN: 0-8101-2218-9
Page Count: 365
Publisher: Northwestern Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2005
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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