Not quite: half-untold, half-old is more like it, along with a ton of reprints and a pound of self-promotion, in this so-so look at investigative biography. According to Weinberg (Journalism/Univ. of Missouri; Armand Hammer, 1989), the biographical arts changed forever in 1975, when Robert Caro published his Pulitzer-winning The Power Broker. Until then, biography had belonged to scholars writing objective lives of dead subjects; suddenly, it fell into the hands of journalists muckraking about the living. After a brief history of the genre (earlier groundbreakers: Boswell and Strachey), Weinberg digs into The Power Broker, as well as the first volumes of Caro's LBJ bio, to show how a ruthless search for sources (e.g., tracking down every living grammar-school classmate of Johnson's) and a high-wire writing style revolutionized the field. In similar fashion, Weinberg pores over the work of Donald Barlett and James Steele (``the best team in the history of investigative reporting''), showing how their brilliant Philadelphia Inquirer exposÇs of the IRS, the FHA, and so on came through obsessive detective work. Perhaps to add the personal touch, Weinberg also describes his own methods in writing his biography of Armand Hammer. A look at magazine profiles follows, along with a litany of the obstacles, mostly legal, put in biographers' paths. Weinberg offers 11 guidelines to good biography; he also includes loads of reprints, including: ``A Note on Sources'' from each of the Caro works; a minibiography by Barlett and Steele from a nuclear-waste exposÇ; a New Yorker Calvin Trillin profile of a police reporter; a scathing Washington Post Magazine exposÇ of Kitty Kelley; and, without a blush, a Los Angeles Times piece that heaps praise on his own Hammer biography. Useful for biographer-wannabes. Otherwise, read Kelley for kicks, Caro for crack reporting, Boswell for brilliance.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-8262-0873-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Univ. of Missouri
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1992
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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