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
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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