From jazz singer TormÇ (It Wasn't All Velvet, 1988, etc.)—an engaging warts-and-all life of the world's greatest drummer, Buddy Rich. A life of Rich has its problems, particularly his terrible mouth, which stripped flesh from bone without a second's notice and for next to no reason. At 18 months, Rich joined his parents on the vaudeville stage as a wonderchild of the drums. Soon ``Traps'' was a featured act, at last getting top billing wherever he played. Completely lacking a formal education, Rich spent his whole life on the road. An adulated jazz drummer who drew shouting audiences to their feet daily and became the featured soloist of famed swing bands led by Harry James, Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, etc., the performer lived an emotionally surreal life. On top of this, though he didn't drink (it would have ruined his timing), he smoked pot daily from age 18 onward. As with heavy dope-smoker Bob Marley, TormÇ wonders whether pot contributed to the brain tumors that finally killed Rich. In some ways, the drummer's greatest successes were with others' big bands. His own big band (first underwritten by fellow Dorseyite Frank Sinatra) folded time and time again. Rich made many movies and became a regular on The Tonight Show, his acerbic barbs delighting drum-lover Johnny Carson. But he lost friend after friend, his vitriol scarring all without reservation, though he mellowed late in life when the birth of a grandchild somehow freed him to love himself through the baby. Otherwise, he seemed entirely without feeling, until one day he dragged TormÇ to see his favorite film, Norma Shearer's Smilin' Through. TormÇ got MGM to put the movie on videocassette as a present for Rich, but Rich alienated TormÇ by vilely insulting him at the very moment the present was given. Exceptional on music biz and drum techniques while humanizing an emotional monster. A labor of love.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-19-507038-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1991
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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