A vivid interpretation of the life of a remarkable musician perfect for “anyone who’s ever struggled to express themselves.”
A mostly wordless illustrated tribute to a celebrated yet doomed jazz musician.
In this unconventional graphic biography, Canadian cartoonist and illustrator Chantler chronicles the life of legendary 1920s musician Leon “Bix” Beiderbecke (1903-1931). Calling him the “unlikeliest of jazz heroes,” the author re-creates the musician’s life through a series of cartoon panels that relate events from previous biographies, varying in interpretation and reliability. Chantler’s drawings chronicle Beiderbecke’s childhood in World War–era Iowa, where he was raised by critical, conservative parents. The story then moves to his boyhood, when his love of music and harmonic jazz melodies blossomed, particularly after hearing it live from a passing river steamboat. Though his schooling suffered, he matured as a mostly self-taught musician, scoring gigs with local bands and garnering regional notoriety. Inspired by Louis Armstrong, Bix rose to prominence as an outstanding jazz pianist and cornetist. However, chronic alcohol dependency would lead to his death at age 28. Chantler’s treatment of the musician’s life is distinctly creative, capturing moods through facial expressions and tightly detailed panels. In the brief introduction, the author readily admits that several scenes in the book are “apocryphal at best,” but he notes that the silent nature of its contents and the manner in which Bix’s life is portrayed reflects the struggle of many hypercreative, misunderstood artists (himself included) to express themselves in terms outside of the art they create. His experimental visualization of musical rhythms in scenes depicting Bix’s career high points is a marvel of imaginative illustrated narration. Chantler poignantly notes that the book was drawn during a devastating upheaval in his own personal life and that sketching it served as a “life raft for my battered sense of self.” This biographical storybook is a unique keepsake for jazz fans.
A vivid interpretation of the life of a remarkable musician perfect for “anyone who’s ever struggled to express themselves.”Pub Date: April 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5011-9078-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Gallery 13/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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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