A sensitive and thoughtful take on a much-loved song.
British music writer Turner (Trouble Man, 2000, etc.) pens an informative biography of the man who wrote “Amazing Grace” and a comprehensive chronicle of the hymn’s journey to cultural iconhood.
Born in 1725 in London, the son of a prosperous sea captain, John Newton had a rebellious nature that in his youth warred with his religious impulses. Press-ganged into the service of the Royal Navy, he deserted, was found, beaten, and returned to the ship, which then set sail for West Africa. There, Newton left the ship to work for a slave trader on Plantain Island. It was a miserable existence: the food was bad, the climate awful, and his employers tough. But Newton as yet had no sympathy for the plight of the slaves themselves; Turner suggests that his guilt about being involved in the slave trade came long after the 1748 storm at sea during which Newton encountered God’s grace, soon to be immortalized in his hymn. Determined to change his life, he left the sea and became a minister. Back in England, he preached, wrote hymns, and became the confidant of such luminaries as Lord Dartmouth (after whom the American college is named); the poet William Cowper; and British abolitionist William Wilberforce. “Amazing Grace” appeared in hymnals during Newton’s life and then made its way to the US, where it became a staple at revival meetings. Turner traces its earliest published American appearance, the origin of the tune that would be associated with it, and its growing audience. He shows the hymn being played by pipe bands at funerals, recorded by musicians as different as Mahalia Jackson and Sinead O’Connor, and sung at a London rock festival to celebrate Nelson Mandela’s release from jail. He also details the influence of versions by Judy Collins, Aretha Franklin, and the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards Pipe Band.
A sensitive and thoughtful take on a much-loved song.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-06-000218-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
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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