Country legend Tanya Tucker tells her tumultuous life story with warmth and modesty. Tucker (born in 1958) lived fast and hard, only settling down in recent years. When she recorded her first hit, ``Delta Dawn,'' the confident 13-year-old introduced herself to her stellar backup band by saying, ``I know my part, boys. Do you know yours?'' She inherited this bravura from her father, who pushed his way through music industry doors on behalf of Tucker. He is omnipresent in the book, sometimes dominating his daughter's professional and personal life, managing her career, and at one point arranging an intervention of family and friends to convince Tucker to check into the Betty Ford clinic. Tucker defends her father throughout, giving him most of the credit for her success. Professionally, the book charts Tucker's growth from a naive young singer to the mature performer and songwriter she has become. Tucker's life has provided much grist for the tabloids over the years, and readers will likely find her version of these notorious episodes compelling. She had a rocky affair with fellow country singer Glen Campbell, with whom she often took drugs. During one argument, he knocked out her two front teeth with his elbow. When Campbell announced that his wife was pregnant and that he wouldn't leave her, Tucker ran off with Merle Haggard. Tucker has two children, both born out of wedlock, and she kept the father's identity secret—even from the father— for some time. Tucker's hard-living and frequent excesses ensure that there are no dull moments in her story. But readers will come to like the singer well enough to wish her less interesting times. (16 pages color photos, not seen)
Pub Date: April 11, 1997
ISBN: 0-7868-6305-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1997
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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