The author’s approach allows him to tell more of the story, and even without presenting Marley’s voice directly, this is an...
An oral history that presents a well-rounded portrait of the music legend, allowing for multiple, sometimes-conflicting, points of view.
Robert Nesta Marley (1945-1981) left a legacy of beautiful music, helping to push reggae from its Jamaican roots out into the world at large. Mindful of the many books about Marley already available, reggae historian Steffens (The Family Acid, 2015, etc.) worked to make a complete narrative covering the musician’s entire life and filling in the cracks left by previous books. The author goes into great detail about Marley’s early recordings, the inner workings of the Wailers, and the cancer that eventually took Marley’s life. Steffens has interviewed dozens of major and minor players in Marley’s life, including Wailers Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer, Island Records’ Chris Blackwell, Marley’s mother, Cedella Booker, and various friends, musicians, and associates. There is a fullness to the collective weight of all these observations that is well-suited to the oral history format. What emerges is a not a clear picture of Marley the man but rather a true sense of how complicated his life was. His legend and impact, his work ethic, his abilities as a musician and leader—these are beyond question—but there are a lot of contrasting voices. On the question of who wrote “I Shot the Sheriff,” for example, Marley’s then-girlfriend Esther Anderson and his friend Lee Jaffe both think the story starts with them. There are disagreements over how people met, who paid royalty payments, who deserves credit for music and lyrics, etc. Steffens inserts himself as a voice like any of the others, offering structure and sometimes serving as a referee. If someone has told what has proven to be a lie, the author steps in and clarifies. But mostly, he lets his subjects speak for themselves.
The author’s approach allows him to tell more of the story, and even without presenting Marley’s voice directly, this is an illuminating portrait of an extraordinary life.Pub Date: July 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-393-05845-1
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 7, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2017
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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