A well-written contribution to jazz history, and fine tribute to Morton’s life and work.
A smart and engaging exploration of an inventive jazzman’s lost years.
Ferdinand “Jelly Roll” Morton (1891–1941) claimed, against evidence well known even in his day, to have invented jazz: “New Orleans,” he wrote to the believe-it-or-not radio host Robert Ripley, “is the cradle of jazz, and I, myself, happened to be the creator in the year 1902.” Whatever the merits of that boast, Morton certainly invented his own past, carefully concealing certain details, conjuring others, and “sticking to a policy of not telling his current mate about any of his previous loves unless he absolutely had to.” In all of this, Pastras (English/ Pasadena City Coll.) suggests, Morton resembles no one so much as the legendary Greek traveler Odysseus, right down to his last storm-dogged passage from New York to California in 1940. He was no stranger to the West, having lived in and around Los Angeles from 1917 to 1923, but his first long sojourn there has been something of a mystery to jazz historians. Drawing on Morton’s diaries and scrapbooks, and reading between the lines of interviews with Morton conducted by Alan Lomax and other musicologists and journalists, Pastras guesses that Morton went West for several reasons, not the least of which was his four-decades-long relationship with Anita Gonzalez, a woman as complicated and mysterious as he. (He may also have been on the run from criminals he had crossed, as well as from a voodoo curse.) The author teases out the facts of Morton’s tumultuous romance with Gonzalez (whom Morton called “the only woman I ever loved”) while chronicling Morton’s work in southern California, which ranged from playing piano in mixed-race clubs to composing and recording some of his best-known tunes (including “Someday, Sweetheart,” “Kansas City Stomps,” and “Mamanita”).
A well-written contribution to jazz history, and fine tribute to Morton’s life and work.Pub Date: July 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-520-21523-0
Page Count: 227
Publisher: Univ. of California
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2001
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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