A moving tribute to an artist who should not be forgotten.
From journalist and Motown chronicler Benjaminson (The Lost Supreme: The Life of Dreamgirl Florence Ballard, 2009, etc.), a compelling, sympathetic biography of Motown’s first diva Mary Wells (1943–1992).
Before Diana Ross or any other Motown star, there was Wells. Discovered at age 17 by Berry Gordy, president of the then-fledgling Motown, in 1960, the young Detroit schoolgirl went on to create a number of crossover hits (appealing to both black and white audiences), including her signature song, “My Guy.” Wells would define the style (long gowns and glamour) for later female Motown artists and the sound (“a strong melody, a noticeable beat, and accessibility for all”) that would bring enormous success and wealth to Motown. Yet, in a dispute over money, Wells left Motown, and while she spent the rest of her life trying to do so, she was never able to equal the success she had there. Trekking from one record company to another, she could never recreate the elusive magic of recording for Motown. “Nostalgia,” however, “kept her performing career alive,” and she performed “almost every other night, week after week,” becoming, for better or worse, “Queen of the Oldies.” Benjaminson ably captures the artistic milieu of early Motown, in which Wells’ art flourished. He also offers an unvarnished account of her tumultuous personal life: her numerous, sometimes disastrous, relations with a series of men, the drug and alcohol addictions that consumed her later in life, and her long battle to defeat the cancer that would take her life. While a flawed figure, Wells faced life’s hardships “by struggling and achieving until the very end.”
A moving tribute to an artist who should not be forgotten.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-56976-248-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 5, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
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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