A remarkable memoir by a remarkable artist.
The memoir of the resilient career of a singer who knows how closely he succumbed to self-parody.
Jones knows how most people think of him: “Tom Jones: panty magnet.” With a tone that suggests that he never takes himself too seriously but knows that he deserves to be taken more seriously as an artist, he relates how the ritual started with one uninhibited female fan and how he instinctively wiped the sweat from his brow and handed them back to her. Thus began a ritual that would become more the focus of a Tom Jones show than the music, with countless women bringing along an extra pair of underwear just to toss. From his days as the teenage son of a Welsh coal miner, Tommy Woodward—later “Twisting Tommy Scott” before settling on the stage name he would ride to fame—knew that he had a powerful voice and that there was an animal magnetism to his presence, though occasionally he found himself the prey of men who could do something for him but wanted something back. He was a huge fan of Jerry Lee Lewis (on whose album he first heard “Green, Green Grass of Home”) and thought Elvis Presley was comparatively contrived. But though he had the voice and soul of a rocker, his career path ended up taking him through the theater circuit and TV, with novelty numbers like, “What’s New Pussycat?” Though he’s not in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, he claims, “there’s more rock ’n’ roll in me than there is in 90%” of those in there. In attitude and anecdote, his engaging and illuminating book backs him up. Perhaps most impressive is the love story with the woman he married almost 60 years ago—after a teenage pregnancy—and the artistic command he has shown in recent years, since he stopped dyeing his hair and started paying more attention to the quality of his material than its pelvis-thrusting potential.
A remarkable memoir by a remarkable artist.Pub Date: Nov. 24, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-59240-961-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Blue Rider Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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