The First Lady of Song is more than deserving of a full-length biography, and English musician-critic Nicholson (Jazz: The Modern Resurgence, not reviewed) is erudite and intelligent. But this book is too often a pedestrian catalogue of dates, places, and band personnel. Perhaps the problem is, as one of his sources says, ``There's no scandal about Ella.... And that doesn't make for exciting journalism.'' As is the case for many key figures in jazz, Ella Fitzgerald's public persona is a mÇlange of fact and fancy, legend and reality. This book, which corrects and updates a slightly earlier European edition, blows away some of the mist. Among other minor revelations Nicholson provides is the news that Ella was born out of wedlock in 1917, a year earlier than previously thought; that she had a disastrous first marriage in the mid-1930s to a smooth-talking ex-con that was annulled, and that she had affairs with several younger men during the '60s. Much more compelling is the rags-to-riches story of a young black girl, orphaned in her early teens, who rose to become one of the great artists of jazz, who has garnered countless awards, international fame, and adulation. The best passages are those that analyze Fitzgerald's unique singing style. He brings a musician's insight to these sections and even the die-hard Fitzgerald fan will learn something new from them. The book also includes an exhaustive discography by jazz historian Phil Schaap, which makes it a valuable addition to the jazz bookshelf. When he isn't writing about the music itself, Nicholson's prose lies limply on the page. But his musical analyses enliven his language, and his treatment of his subject's human and musical strengths and weaknesses is well balanced.
Pub Date: May 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-684-19699-9
Page Count: 322
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1994
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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