For die-hard Ray Charles fans only.
Unremarkable memoir of the son of music legend Ray Charles.
Robinson recalls his upbringing and relationship with Charles based on his childhood memories, which are incomplete at best, and his own life story is simply not as compelling as his father’s. The most engaging sections of the book concern Robinson’s youth. In plain prose, he re-creates a sense of his father’s rapid upward trajectory in the 1950s after a life of struggle, and his surreal existence as the inquisitive child of a brilliant black celebrity in a segregated America. As a child, his father was present in his life as a benevolent, fascinating, yet distant figure. Robinson is frank about the darker undercurrents in his father’s meticulously arranged existence as family man and famous bandleader. He became aware of his heroin addiction before it culminated in the musician’s 1965 arrest, as well as his penchant for extramarital affairs. “My father's appetite for women was insatiable,” he writes. When the author was 18, in 1973, his mother finally initiated divorce proceedings, which shocked and embittered Charles, who “had convinced himself that the other women shouldn't matter to her as long as she was his wife and he took care of her.” Throughout, Robinson’s writing is workmanlike and bland, and the narrative becomes tedious as the adult author repeatedly sobers up and relapses into drug use. Even producing the lauded film Ray triggered this cycle—“the film would force me to revisit all the trauma, fear, and anxiety of my childhood.” With regard to his father’s death in 2004, Robinson flagellates himself for not spending more time with him in his last days, and accuses Charles’ handlers of quickly shutting out family members as the music world honored an icon.
For die-hard Ray Charles fans only.Pub Date: June 8, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-307-46293-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2010
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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
