This particular song of the South merely scratches the surface of a legend.
A veteran novelist and nonfiction writer offers a Southerner’s take on country music’s poet laureate.
Hemphill, author of The Nashville Sound, an early look at the country music industry, and a number of other works with a Southern perspective, arrives decidedly late at the Hank Williams biography party. It’s difficult to imagine anyone improving on Colin Escott’s award-winning, meticulously researched 1994 work on Williams, revised last year; the Canadian writer, who won a Grammy as co-producer of a set of Williams’s complete recordings, added to the literature with Hank Williams: Snapshots From the Lost Highway (with Kira Florita, 2001) and his work on the 2004 PBS documentary about the country singer. Hemphill acknowledges Escott’s scholarship in his own unscholarly book, which offers the barest outline of Williams’s brief, tortured career. That outline is familiar to any Williams fan: his hardscrabble Alabama upbringing; the meteoric success of his simple, cuttingly affecting songs; his slug-it-out relationship with first wife, Audrey; his drug- and drink-plagued stardom; and his precipitous decline, including his sideshow-like marriage to second spouse, Billie; and his sudden death at 29 as 1953 dawned. There’s no deep new research here—the most talkative sources appear to be Williams’s steel guitarist Don Helms and Charles Carr, who chauffeured the musician on the night he died. Hemphill, a fellow Alabamian, takes the tack that Hank was a good ol’ boy just like Hemphill’s father, a long-distance trucker who liked to pound out Williams’s songs on the piano. The writer splashes plenty of local color on his canvas, especially in passages about Williams’s barnstorming early days. But he never reveals anything essential about his subject as an artist or as a suffering human being; worse, he never explains how or why so distinctly Southern a musician achieved such universality in his lifetime, on his own and in covers of his songs by such unlikely performers as Tony Bennett.
This particular song of the South merely scratches the surface of a legend.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2005
ISBN: 0-670-03414-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2005
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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