Occasionally entertaining yet featherweight capers of an overweight woman trying to be cheery and carefree through her...
How one woman tackled some of the things on her mid-40s bucket list.
For fans of Lancaster’s (Twisted Sisters, 2014, etc.) particular brand of humor, she’s back in full swing with another memoir full of embarrassing moments, comments about her size and weight, and general midlife-crisis events triggered by realizing she has turned 46 and should create a list of things to accomplish before she dies. “As enamored as I am with the idea of listing and then finally scratching some long-standing itches, a part of this idea feels off,” she writes. “Essentially, I’m figuring out what I’d like to accomplish before I ‘kick the bucket,’ which means I’m definitely going to die. Not a fan.” From this point of view, Lancaster prepares her list, starting with a new playlist of music since she had been listening to the same bands for 30 years. The author meanders through a variety of escapades: learning to ride an adult tricycle, studying Italian, traveling to Italy, finding a new hobby, confronting her weight issues and compulsive eating habits, etc. She discusses her dogs, her husband, her friends, her dysfunctional body parts, a possible chance to meet and talk face to face with Martha Stewart, the challenge of doing juice cleanses—basically, just about anything that comes to mind she approaches with the same attitude: somewhat funny, quick, and lighthearted, reminiscent of sitcom humor but lacking any real substance or grit. Readers may laugh in the moment, but the punch line doesn’t carry over in a retelling. For pure entertainment of the lightest fluff, Lancaster is sure to please her many devoted readers; for those looking for words of wisdom on how a woman can navigate the 40-to-50 decade with dignity, while still having fun, they should search elsewhere for sustenance.
Occasionally entertaining yet featherweight capers of an overweight woman trying to be cheery and carefree through her middle-age years.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-451-47107-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: NAL/Berkley
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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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