A rollicking piece of gonzo journalism by a novelist whose first book, Stark Raving Elvis (1984), was a fictional take on the same subject. Gamely accepting a challenge from his editor, the 52-year-old Henderson set about making himself into a plausible Elvis impersonator: He acquired a brass-studded jumpsuit, wig, and karaoke tapes; scoped out other working Elvises; practiced the songs and the moves. A musician friend let him try out a mini Elvis set in the middle of an outdoor concert, then he entered a contest in New Hampshire (he came in last) and performed in an Elvis showcase in Jacksonville, Fla., in preparation for the grand prix of the mock-Elvis circuit, Memphis's annual Images of Elvis competition. Henderson's project actually required two visits to Memphis: On his preliminary visit to ``the holy city,'' an old pal with the immortal name of Fetzer Mills showed Henderson the highlights, including Sun Studios, Graceland, and an Elvis shrine outside of town called Graceland Too, an antebellum house crammed full of Elvis memorabilia and open 24 hours. (Fetzer, who sings rockabilly, bounces between jobs, and tries to market fat brown ``Elvis Buddha'' figurines to the local souvenir shops, is one of the best literary characters in some time, fiction or nonfiction.) Henderson captures without fuss or condescension the gut-level fandom that makes people, including himself, want to impersonate Elvis, and he is dead-on about the cultural divide, largely along class lines, that separates Elvis fans from those who have never really gotten it. (Fetzer offers another theme for the book: ``It's the generation war between the young Elvises and the mutants.'') But Henderson's great achievement is to convey, in elegantly droll prose, what it's like to imagine being a great performer—``the Elvis equivalent of flying dreams''—in the face of real-world evidence to the contrary. A jolly, sparkling trip through Elvis country. (photos, not seen) (For another look at Elvis impersonators, see Leslie Rubinkowski, Impersonating Elvis, p. 858.)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-57297-255-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1997
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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