An invaluable life narrative of a key jazz stylist that raises disturbing questions about the shabby treatment accorded...
The moving, startling tale of a near-forgotten jazz master’s return from oblivion.
Veteran music biographer Ritz (Aretha, not reviewed, etc.) is attuned to the complicated life of Cleveland-born Jimmy Scott. An unusual, Candide-like figure, Scott was traumatized early by his mother’s death, his exploitative father’s dissolution of the family, and by Kallman’s Syndrome, a condition that essentially halted his physiological development in puberty. Yet Scott, a perpetual optimist, gravitated toward the thriving Cleveland jazz scene. By the late 1940s, he’d made his name as vocalist in Lionel Hampton’s band, known for his hypnotic phrasing and a haunted alto singing voice that seemed to transcend gender. Although few of Scott’s vocals charted, he became a signal influence among his peers; friends and supporters included Charlie Parker, Lester Young, Dinah Washington, and Ray Charles. Like many African-American musicians of the time, Scott signed an ill-advised recording deal that paid tiny advances and kept him contractually bound for years. The villain here was Savoy Records’ notoriously cheap executive, Herman Lubinsky, who refused to record Scott after the 1950s yet twice scuttled releases (including one with Charles) that would have revived his career. Instead, Scott spent the next several decades in obscurity, holding service jobs in Newark and Cleveland. Ironically, his performance at the 1991 funeral of songwriter Doc Pomus, another of his stalwart supporters, reintroduced him to a fickle industry and resulted in a new record deal. Ritz writes smartly about Scott’s recordings and unique musical qualities, but his unadorned style cannot match the dark drama of his subject’s travails. That comes across most vividly in the extensive quotes from Scott himself, who offers a humorously unvarnished account of his life, including his misadventures with touring, women, and drink. His recollections provide a rare, engrossing first-person account of the African-American musical scene of the 1940s and ’50s.
An invaluable life narrative of a key jazz stylist that raises disturbing questions about the shabby treatment accorded Scott’s musical generation.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2002
ISBN: 0-306-81088-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002
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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