Just once, Jonathan, let go and try writing with both fists.
Clever, self-involved performer and author Ames (What’s Not to Love?, 2000, etc.) can’t seem to let himself alone, mentally or physically, and he gleefully tells us all about it in this gathering of newspaper essays, journal entries, fiction, and miscellany.
His solipsistic record of naughty adventures home alone or out with ladies of the night, porn stars, tranny hookers, and various kinky people is certainly not Mr. Pepys's kind of diary. Ames is Alexander Portnoy come to life: lascivious, overwrought, and funny, though not nearly as funny as Portnoy, even if he does label his personality disorder as “Comic-Depressive.” His giddy depression and manic misery are always first-person, up-front, and in-your-face. He is partial to drinking and shtupping, drag queens and masturbation, beautiful breasts and behinds, oral sex and phone sex. Even the putative book reviews are self-centered, with a determinedly raunchy affect. If you haven’t heard about his pal’s invention of a sexual artifact called “the mangina,” you haven’t been paying attention—and you’re lucky. Granted, Ames can write. His recounting of his adventures as “The Herring Wonder” (a supposed incarnation of a Lower East Side Jewish boxer), a visit to a gathering of S&M groupies, and a purloined manuscript demonstrate his talent. But all the palaver about anatomy (male, female, or indeterminate) and all the stream of consciousness concerning the diverse uses of body parts (his or not) are essentially variations on one note and, as such, become a tad tedious. Though Ames mentions his editors, his text seems never to have crossed any editor’s desk. It isn’t entirely trash talk, but it isn’t mainstream material that will please the local Watch and Ward Society or General Ashcroft. For the rest of us, as Ames says, “When something’s not your hobby, you can only take so much”—for instance, the author’s report that he needs to grasp his penis when he is writing.
Just once, Jonathan, let go and try writing with both fists.Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 1-56025-375-4
Page Count: 380
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2002
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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