Connolly carefully and sympathetically paints the many faces of Presley, faces eventually shrouded in despair.
A veteran London-based journalist rehearses the rise and fall of Elvis Presley (1935-1977).
Connolly (The Ray Connolly Beatles Archive, 2016, etc.), who interviewed Presley while working for the London Evening Standard, is a fan as well as a stout critic, and his work is full of praise for his subject’s musicianship, voice, and work ethic. But the author is unblinking about the myriads of problems that Elvis faced, and created, throughout his career: his serial sexual infidelities, his wild spending, his failures as a friend, and, of course, his increasing reliance on drugs and his inability to defeat his demons. Near the end, we see an angry, paranoid man, offering himself as a federal drug agent to serve President Richard Nixon, carrying multiple firearms, and winging all over the country in search of peace. Connolly follows a conventional biographical path from Elvis’ impoverished birth in Tupelo, Mississippi, to his seclusion and death behind the gates of Graceland in Memphis. The author also focuses on his multiple musical talents, his determination to broaden his musical appeal, his influence on many musicians who followed him. There is a sad scene at Graceland when the Beatles—the latest superstars—arrive to pay homage. We see Elvis’ social awkwardness and the Beatles’ playfulness, and we yearn for a recording of the music they played together. Connolly also keeps us in touch with Elvis’ family—and his devotion to them—and to the relationship between Presley and his long-term manager, Col. Tom Parker, whose self-destructive gambling habits are astonishing. Parker would never let Elvis tour abroad, an odd insistence that cost them all millions in lost revenue. The author illuminates, as well, the many forgettable Presley films, his final years in Las Vegas, and the brutal touring schedule that ground him down.
Connolly carefully and sympathetically paints the many faces of Presley, faces eventually shrouded in despair.Pub Date: Dec. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-63149-280-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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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