A depressing pathography positing that every instant of Elvis's life was warped by the stillbirth of his twin brother, Jesse, and the consequent morbidly close relationship between Elvis and his mother, Gladys. Psychologist Whitmer (When the Going Gets Weird: The Twisted Life and Times of Hunter S. Thompson, 1993, etc.) says that ``twinless twins'' feel driven to prove their uniqueness, but after attaining recognition they feel survivor guilt. They also have a pathologically strong maternal bond; Whitmer asserts that Elvis was ``clearly'' a victim of ``lethal enmeshment,'' or ``nonsexual incest.'' Source notes, which might provide clinical authority for all of this, were not available for review; but Phyllis Diller offers her expert theory that ``if his twin had lived, I am sure that Elvis's twin would have been gay.'' Up to a point, Whitmer's theories have some merit, but the book goes overboard in reducing Elvis's musical accomplishments to the side effect of a near-crippling neurosis. The sinister tone of unrelenting torment—even Elvis's devious manager, Col. Tom Parker, is said to operate out of a ``pit of fear''—owes much to John Bradshaw's brand of character analysis, in which no tic is too minor to be a symptom of incest. Considering that he was insulated from the world and insistently hungry for food, drugs, sex, and the company of his Memphis Mafia during the 1960s and '70s, Elvis's psychopathology is a significant issue, but the reduction of all these needs to the Jesse/Gladys/Elvis nexus seems facile. And while Whitmer attempts to portray the social, familial, musical, and cultural context from which Elvis emerged, this material was handled much more sensitively and informatively in Peter Guralnick's thrilling study, Last Train to Memphis (1994). Marred by many errors and doggedly intent on turning Elvis into a traumatized pop-psych poster boy, Whitmer's version of the life makes for unpleasant reading. (8 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Aug. 16, 1996
ISBN: 0-7868-6102-9
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1996
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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