An unbalanced, frequently depressive autobiography that primarily focuses on the past, leaving little room for the author’s...
A Grammy-winning singer/songwriter reveals the early genesis of his family, predating a marriage to Rosanne Cash (whose 2010 memoir, Composed, is a can't-miss) and the ascent to musical stardom.
Crowell’s introduction to the world of country music began early in small-town Texas, when banjo chords and Hank Williams records sweetened a childhood embittered by familial discord. Raised in a house without a bedroom of his own, the author was relegated to sleeping in the family home’s creepy front room, where he became an unwilling witness to his parents’ shouting matches and the violence borne from his father’s drinking binges. Frequently frustrated with the inescapable drama, Crowell recalls disrupting his parents’ raucous New Year’s Eve party in 1955; at age five, he frightened guests away by brandishing the rifle hidden in the hall closet. Years later, the family moved to a ramshackle, “post–World War II housing project” in central Texas that was soon decimated by Hurricane Carla. Crowell lovingly and often drolly describes a gassy grandmother, a banjo-playing grandfather, feuding uncles and Cauzette, his strident, God-fearing mother crippled with double dyslexia, epilepsy and a string of heartbreaking miscarriages. In this same tone, the author also discusses life with his boozy father and the distress of a tough childhood. His mother’s hysterically seething religious convictions and frequent nonchalant requests to fetch feminine-hygiene products tempered their embarrassing public “prizefights.” Yet these rough spots are interspersed with summery recollections of a boyhood spent chumming around and banding together with neighborhood mischief makers, and of his father’s drumming lessons, prepping him to play in his band at age 11, then on to higher heights as a budding musician. While Crowell’s narrative becomes a viscerally powerful diary of a boyhood hobbled by a dysfunctional family, his burgeoning love of music and the fruits of that talent get left behind. Could a follow-up be in the works?
An unbalanced, frequently depressive autobiography that primarily focuses on the past, leaving little room for the author’s resoundingly successful present.Pub Date: Jan. 18, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-307-59420-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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