Goodman (1909-86) bestrides the Swing Era in this stirring portrait that focuses largely on the clarinetist's wonder years during the 30's and 40's—though his childhood as a musical prodigy and his later years following the death of the big bands get their due. Firestone's bio (following his coauthored lives of Diahann Carroll, Gary Crosby, and Elizabeth Ashley) is livelier and more readable than James Lincoln Collier's Benny Goodman and the Swing Era (1989), though Collier (a professional horn player) gave a richer analysis of the music. The Goodman story swings here—partly because of changes in Goodman's odd, often thorny character, and partly because readers may dig out records to swing along with Goodman, Harry James, and the other greats blowing on these pages (in 1933 alone, Goodman cut over 250 sides). Born into the Chicago slums as the ninth of 12 children, Goodman spent his early years in dire poverty, with his Jewish father at times having to shovel swine guts in the meatpacking factories. At ten, the clarinet became the boy's escape hatch. Not only was he a prodigy, he practiced incessantly to achieve perfection and, in later years, when he formed his own band, he rehearsed prodigiously and demanded perfection from his players. Goodman's terrible glance at a player who fluffed a note or had a bad intonation was called ``the X- ray''—or just ``the Ray.'' For years, the band business was unstable and, perhaps unconsciously, Goodman feared the bottom would drop out and plunge him back into poverty. As his swing band rose to number one, climaxing with 1938's famed Carnegie Hall concert, he grew ever more tense and demanding, firing and hiring willy-nilly—and remained so until the end of his life. Much of the story's energy comes from Goodman's hunger for hot swing and his love of killer-diller arrangements that, alas, the dance halls hated—posing the steady threat of disbanding. Benny blows—and the angels sing.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-393-03371-6
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1992
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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
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