Tart, self-assured, and lasting.
It can’t be said that her relationship with Bob Marley was easy, but his wife of 15 years portrays it as intensely close and spiritual.
Rita Marley grew up in the rough Trench Town slums of Kingston, Jamaica. She was born to sing, and it wasn’t long before she conspired to bump into the Wailing Wailers as they walked to the recording studio down the road from her house. She formed the Soulettes to serve as the Wailers’ backup singers, and she formed a bond with Bob Marley close enough to lead to marriage. She joined Bob in the Rastafarian movement, which has some very specific prescriptions and proscriptions—although evidently, having numerous sexual relations outside marriage was not one of them, as Bob rarely spent the night with Rita. When she decided in 1971, after years of desperate poverty, that “the music thing was definitely not working” and she would have to go work in the US, leaving her children prompted sharp sadness. Meanwhile, Bob was busy back home getting two girlfriends pregnant. After Island Records took a chance on the “bad boys” against industry advice, they shot to fame, Bob played around even more, and the Marleys became as brother and sister. Rita’s role was to serve as protector: “I’d become more like a guardian. . . . I had more responsibility than just that of a wife,” she writes, admitting that the situation often pained her (“The boys born while I was in Delaware were not the last born outside our marriage, and I ended up taking care of many of them”). Marley doesn’t mince her words as she describes Trench Town, the trials of being penniless followed by the trials of being wealthy, and Bob’s probably preventable death.
Tart, self-assured, and lasting.Pub Date: April 7, 2004
ISBN: 0-7868-6867-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2004
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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
