The portrait is warts and all, to be sure, but respectful—and it’ll make readers want to seek out the singer and songwriter,...
The late soul singer’s son turns in a thoughtful appreciation of his father, the author of the civil rights anthem “People Get Ready.”
Curtis Mayfield (1942-1999), perhaps the most famous graduate of Chicago’s infamous Cabrini-Green housing project, has been the subject of several books in whole or part. It seems unnecessarily contentious of his son to say that no previous biographer has done a good job at least in part because “they didn’t know where he came from.” He means that idiomatically, it seems, as well as genealogically, though it’s not very helpful to lay part of the difficulty on Mayfield’s “deeply divided nature as a Gemini.” Still, once the younger Mayfield settles into the story, he delivers an effective portrait of a man possessed of great talents and the usual demons. Late of the Impressions, paralyzed in a terrible accident that effectively ended his solo career, Mayfield is known today for his work on the soundtrack to the blaxploitation film Superfly, a flick more often referred to than seen, but it is really for “People Get Ready”—covered by everyone from the Staples Singers to Rod Stewart—that Mayfield is best known. Here we see the song nicely deconstructed, its message an appeal to the coded Negro spirituals whose audiences knew very well that the train to Jordan was really a train out of Mississippi. The author is occasionally heavy-handed and obvious, as when he makes a trope of the childhood nickname Smut and Mayfield’s sensitivity over his large teeth. However, just as often he turns up things that other writers have underplayed or overlooked, and he hits on the right salient points, notably Mayfield’s contributions to the civil rights struggle in the face of censors and, at times, critics offended by his wordplays on racial slurs.
The portrait is warts and all, to be sure, but respectful—and it’ll make readers want to seek out the singer and songwriter, if they haven’t already fired up their old LPs.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-61373-679-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
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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