A courageous and often unsettling look at the not-so-glamorous consequences of being the offspring of a major celebrity.
James Brown’s daughter recounts her conflicted relationship with the “Godfather of Soul.”
Writing with Fisher (Narrative Journalism/Rutgers Univ.; After the Fire: A True Story of Friendship and Survival, 2008, etc.), Yamma Brown recalls what it was like to grow up in the shadow of one of the most famous and influential entertainers of all time, James Brown (1933-2006). The author begins at the end by recounting her father’s death and subsequent funeral in 2006, which was held at Harlem’s Apollo Theater with the sort of ostentation and pomp that one would expect from James Brown, even in death. From there, she begins to reconstruct an ambivalent portrait of her father’s life, from his time as a youngster shining shoes in small-town Georgia to his eventual position of power in the entertainment industry and all the trappings of fame and celebrity. But in a somewhat jarring transition, the book goes from rosy recollections of riding ponies on the family ranch to the chapter ominously entitled “Dad’s Beating Mom Again.” Suddenly, the memoir takes a seriously dark turn and never looks back. The young author went about the traumatic business of trying to come to terms with domestic violence from a tender age, watching her father physically abuse two unfortunate wives. But even more depressing is the author’s own near-fatal dealings with physical abuse from her own husband, coming about almost as if it were an inherited trait from her battered mother. In fact, the author’s story of life with her conniving, violent, near-psychopath of a husband begins to overtake the story of her relationship with her father. Unfortunately, it took a near-fatal beating from her lowlife husband before she finally scraped up the courage to leave victimhood behind.
A courageous and often unsettling look at the not-so-glamorous consequences of being the offspring of a major celebrity.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-883052-85-0
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
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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