In the past decade, Bennett has been experiencing a renaissance among listeners. Many of them should be happy to hear how he...
The nonagenarian singer expresses his gratitude to many of the people who have helped him along the way.
With the help of NPR host Simon, Bennett presents not so much a memoir as a collection of sweet, uplifting tributes to people ranging from Abraham Lincoln to Lady Gaga as well as places, including Astoria in Queens, New York; the small town of Pyrites in upstate New York; and, of course, San Francisco, where Bennett famously left his heart. Each chapter concludes with a lesson the author has learned or a bit of wisdom gained from the subject of the chapter. Duke Ellington taught him never to worry “about going into or out of style,” and Lena Horne’s resilience made him think, “when life sends you difficulties or misfortunes, don’t get mad or sad—get busy.” From both Fred Astaire, who “used to float past” Bennett’s house on his regular morning walk, and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, the singer learned the same lesson: trim your work down to its essence. His own chapters are neat and modest. If they don’t tell readers much about Bennett’s inner life, home life, or any turmoil he might have experienced over the decades, they do paint miniportraits of many of the people who helped him on his path. Many of them, as might be expected, are musicians or songwriters, like Amy Winehouse, whose death he laments, and Ella Fitzgerald, whose albums provide a “purely joyful experience.” The author also salutes family members, like his father, who died when Bennett was 10, and painters such as Picasso and John Singer Sargent. The volume is illustrated with small reproductions of many of Bennett’s paintings, which he signs with his birth name, Anthony Benedetto.
In the past decade, Bennett has been experiencing a renaissance among listeners. Many of them should be happy to hear how he got to this point.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-247677-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2016
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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