A clear, simple melody played, surprisingly, with very little improvisation or ornamentation, but with enormous respect and...
A former bureau chief for Time and a certified jazz freak from adolescence onward tells his sweet coming-of-age story in pre-Katrina New Orleans when “the mens” (as the black jazz masters called one another) played the music that won his heart.
Sancton, co-author of a clear-eyed account of the death of Princess Di (Death of Princess, 1998, not reviewed), returns with a memoir about his fathers—his biological one (who once edited the New Republic and wrote two novels) and his musical ones, the legendary black musicians of New Orleans, most notably clarinetist George Lewis, the first to tell the author, “You got music inside you.” Sancton believed what he heard and was soon taking lessons at the feet of the masters, playing in street-funeral processions, sitting in at Preservation Hall, often finding himself the lone white face in the band. He played with these men, fished with them, ate with them, visited their simple (and sometimes collapsing) dwellings as if they were religious shrines. The author’s parents were remarkable: They took him to Preservation Hall regularly, befriended many of the musicians, proudly sat in the audience while their son honed his craft. Sancton kept his love mostly hidden from his all-white schoolmates (one girlfriend chided him for spending time with black people) and even played ’60s rock in a high-school group. Sancton’s great public service is to usher these unique artists—almost all of whom are now dead—back onto the stage for one more encore. They become more than mere names. We learn what angered and amused them, what they liked to eat, how they interacted with one another and, in some cases, how they died. Almost all of them kept playing until they simply no longer could. Music for the “mens” was life itself.
A clear, simple melody played, surprisingly, with very little improvisation or ornamentation, but with enormous respect and affection.Pub Date: June 5, 2006
ISBN: 1-59051-243-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2006
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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