A moving musical essay that should strike all the right notes with a wide selection of readers.
A multiplatinum recording artist chronicles her life so far.
When Jewel (A Night Without Armor: Poems, 1999, etc.) first broke onto the scene in 1995, few probably looked upon the golden tresses and ethereal beauty staring back at them from the cover of “Pieces of You” and thought: “hard-assed Alaskan hick.” The cherubic voice on the recording suggested a rarified existence rather than the hardscrabbled reality the author actually endured growing up on the fringes of “the fishing village of Homer, Alaska.” Jewel was the product of an often cruel and dispassionate father and eccentric and absentee mother. Rather than just focusing on her rise as an artist, her career highlights, or music business machinations, Jewel renders an intimate portrait of a young woman who, although immensely talented, has spent her life “surviving and recovering and problem solving since being a toddler.” The autobiography is lushly descriptive, chronicling the author’s earliest days on the old “homestead,” singing in saloons, busking in Mexico, and later living out of broken-down automobiles while trying to make a living in the music business. The author mines her psyche for the benefit of both herself and anyone else embroiled in profound emotional crisis. Without being intrusive, selected lyrics and poems provide further insight into her worldview. Although critical of both parents, the author reserves the lion’s share of her unresolved heartbreak for her mother, who skittered on the periphery of her daughter's autonomous childhood before eventually returning again as the de facto business manager who swiftly plunged the wildly successful singer and songwriter into crushing debt. “I would never get an apology,” she writes. “I would never get a hug. And I would have killed for just a hug.”
A moving musical essay that should strike all the right notes with a wide selection of readers.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-399-17433-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Blue Rider Press
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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