Pair this with Wilson’s equally revealing autobiography Dreamgirl: My Life as a Supreme (1986), and you’ve got an...
A book-length portrait of the best singer in Motown’s biggest group, delivered three decades after her death.
Born in Detroit in 1943, Florence Ballard co-founded the Primettes in 1959 with Diana Ross and Mary Wilson. By 1960, they were working as background singers at Motown Records; when founder Berry Gordy insisted on a new name, Ballard chose the Supremes, and the rest was music history. But all was far from rosy. Ballard was haunted by memories of her rape by a family friend when she was 17; she could be difficult, and she refused to be the controlling Gordy’s “puppet on a string.” Around 1966, angered by all the attention focused on Ross, who made sure the boss liked her best, Ballard began hitting the bottle hard and was fired from the group the following year. Her post-Supremes solo career never took off, and by 1975, when the author was a reporter at the Detroit Free Press, she and her three children were on welfare. Benjaminson’s article about her plight ran nationally, and he won Ballard’s trust. She recounted her life to him in eight hours of interviews taped before she died in 1976. Benjaminson (Secret Police: Inside the New York City Department of Investigation, 1997, etc.) relies heavily on this material—indeed, at times it seems he reproduced the interviews in their entirety—but he works hard to place it in context and bring to light its natural narrative arc. He also read the relevant court documents, as well as dozens of books and magazines, and he interviewed Ballard’s key surviving family members and Mary Wilson. The book sometimes gets bogged down in minutiae and windy song analysis, but Motown obsessives will appreciate the attention to detail, which doesn’t detract too much from the final product.
Pair this with Wilson’s equally revealing autobiography Dreamgirl: My Life as a Supreme (1986), and you’ve got an unmatchable snapshot of the exhilarating yet often ugly 1960s soul music scene.Pub Date: April 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-55652-705-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Lawrence Hill Books/Chicago Review
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2008
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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