One appreciates the effort taken to set the record straight on matters like the creation of Destiny’s Child and the Beyoncé...
A thorough effort from celebrity biographer Taraborrelli (The Hiltons: The True Story of an American Dynasty, 2014, etc.) that’s long on legwork and short on new insight.
In examining the life and career of the famously private Beyoncé Knowles, the author takes great care to give a voice to anyone with a Beyoncé story to tell. From the women who discovered the future superstar to producers, makeup artists, and relatives of each (including the estranged father of a former band mate), Taraborrelli lets everyone with an anecdote tell it here. The chattiest primary source—no one in Beyoncé’s family participated in the book—is Lyndall Locke, Beyoncé’s first boyfriend. His stories of their relationship, spanning Beyoncé’s preteen years through her early 20s, are clearly oft-told. Taraborrelli uses Locke’s testimony liberally and charitably, but no one gets a more understanding treatment than Mathew Knowles, Beyoncé’s father and former manager. While we learn about drug abuse allegations and potential sex addiction, and though he is more than once compared to Joe Jackson, here, Mathew is a tragic character with a fatal flaw: he simply wanted Beyoncé to succeed above all else. In his acknowledgements, Taraborrelli writes that he was excited to tackle a life’s story full of “surprising twists and turns.” The story, ultimately, is Mathew’s, with Beyoncé in a supporting role in the chronicle of her father’s journey from impoverished child to successful businessman to manager of one of the biggest stars of the 21st century—and his fall from that position.
One appreciates the effort taken to set the record straight on matters like the creation of Destiny’s Child and the Beyoncé brand, and it’s admirable that Taraborrelli would make such an effort to give so many people in Beyoncé’s life credit. Unfortunately, meticulous research and interviews with peripheral players don’t offer much that isn’t already known about the superstar who is a shadowy figure.Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4555-1672-8
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2015
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
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
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