This compact biography should please Jackson’s fans even if it doesn’t break new ground in exploring the singer’s life.
TV and radio host Smiley (My Journey with Maya, 2015, etc.) and his frequent writing collaborator Ritz tell the story of the 16 weeks preceding the death of singer Michael Jackson (1958-2009).
Before he died, the King of Pop was preparing for a series of comeback concerts in London. He was also doing a lot of shopping, playing with his three children, watching Shirley Temple movies, making questionable business decisions, receiving almost daily Botox injections, taking an increasing number of prescription painkillers, and suffering from a degree of insomnia that caused him to enlist a doctor to administer the anesthetics that led to his death. The authors delve through a wealth of research material to create a nearly day-by-day account of Jackson’s last weeks, with occasional glimpses into his earlier life. Smiley and Ritz are clearly sympathetic to their subject, sometimes to the point of glossing over Jackson’s more questionable choices and actions. In occasionally purple prose, the authors ratchet up the suspense and drama of this period of the singer’s life, ending most of the brief chapters with some variant on, “Sleep, the most precious of commodities, eluded him,” or “sleep, precious sleep, comes not at all.” The most intriguing sections of the book unravel the complicated business relationships in which Jackson was involved, his attempts to separate himself from his parents and siblings, and his efforts to push his art further while his fans were demanding more of the same. The authors, who set out to understand why their subject died at 50, end up asking a different question: “Given the extraordinary obstacles he faced, the stresses that pulled him apart, how did Michael survive as long as he did?”
This compact biography should please Jackson’s fans even if it doesn’t break new ground in exploring the singer’s life.Pub Date: June 21, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-316-25909-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2016
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
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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