A pain-filled autobiography by vocal artist, and composer Bagby. A former Stanford Law student, the author left school shortly before graduation to find herself. She met singer Bobby McFerrin at one of his concerts and then auditioned for his master class, recording her audition tape on an answering machine because she had no studio access or equipment. Through McFerrin, Bagby began singing with a women’s group called Voicestra, which continues to sustain her both professionally and personally. She interweaves her autobiographical text with lyrics and music from her own compositions, adding flavor to an intensely personal story. Her music emerges from the childhood traumas of dealing with an alcoholic and heroin-addicted father, charming one moment and violent the next; of always playing second fiddle to her musically gifted brother, Nelson; of feeling second-best because she was a daughter and not a son; and of facing racism in educational institutions. As an adult, Bagby has also experienced her share of difficulties. At 25, after leaving law school, she lived on the streets for a month, smoking marijuana every day. When she pulled herself together enough to enroll in an “intentional community,” she was raped on her first night there by a white man. Recovering from that rape has been a difficult process, with more recent heartaches (such as the miscarriage of a longed-for child and her husband’s affair with a white woman) reopening old wounds. Through it all, Bagby tries affirm the female worth, especially the power of daughters, seeking out old stories which show daughters to be of divine lineage. She encourages other women to sing and scream out their own stories, and she offers a clear role model for the refusal to be silent. Raw and very moving, though its terminology (“the red times of my menstrual cycle,” etc.) can be a bit trendy. (Author tour)
Pub Date: May 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-06-251426-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1999
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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