Second, and weaker, bio of Elton John this season. Crimp and Burstein (Family Holiday, 1982) have also written bios (not reviewed) of Jackie and Joan Collins and of Caroline and Stephanie Rainier. Crimp/Burstein come in second to Philip Norman's Elton John (p. 38), which is longer, far denser in detail, richer with interviews, and boasts a thorough discography. Norman also writes better—not great, but better—and his length soaks you so deeply in John that the entertainer, despite his flaws, draws you in with considerable warmth. Aside from a double handful of interviews (none with John, whom Norman failed to land as well), Crimp and Burstein rely largely upon info from secondary sources. John himself can carry any bio, as his ebullient stage persona overrides his deep shyness, baldness, and often puffy face and his battles with alcohol, bulimia and fat. (A recent TV interview with David Frost found him trim as a greyhound, enjoying an ongoing sobriety in A.A.) Crimp and Burstein note that John, the issue of a broken home, has spent his life attempting to assuage his natural father, an archly stiff RAF flight-lieutenant, while enjoying close ties with his mother (with whom he discussed his first homosexual affair when it happened). John and his younger lyricist, Bernie Taupin, met while John was working at Dick James Music (then the Beatles' publishers) and then roomed together for 18 months while John hid out from a financÇe he did not want to marry. Garishly outrageous costumes and madcap glasses camouflaged his shyness during stage appearances, while his pounding musicality and high visibility drove his record sales higher than all others in the British empire. A late marriage failed, and going public about his bisexuality brought unexpected pain. Thinly done, though John makes it all easy reading.
Pub Date: April 1, 1992
ISBN: 1-55972-111-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Birch Lane Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1992
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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