Charting the charms and obstacles in the everyday, Jacobson’s book wobbles here and there, but it’s mostly a pleasure to...
The actor, producer, and series creator turns in a series of sketches, some brilliant and some pedestrian, chronicling episodes in her life to date.
With her friend Ilana Glazer—“a bacon egg and cheese with Ilana, anywhere, anytime,” she writes in an essay on bagels, this one decidedly nonkosher—Jacobson (Carry This Book, 2016, etc.) crafted the hilarious, edgy Comedy Central series Broad City. As she notes in passing, it morphed into something more than just a TV show: “It’s become a visual diagram of sorts in which I track my own life, where I’ve been and where I’m going…a reproduction of my reality.” Many of the pieces are set in far-flung places between the twin poles of Los Angeles and New York—in Santa Fe, say, which Jacobson worries isn’t really real, and Marfa, Texas, which is “so cute.” A common theme throughout the book is ceiling-studying insomnia as the author restlessly travels from town to town; another is wrestling to the point of fretfulness with mundane and big-picture worries alike: “Maybe I’m more Jewish than I think?” As she drives from Santa Fe to Kanab, Utah, she ponders such things as how often she ought to be changing her shoelaces, death and dying, aging, love, missing out on key events, and “if scrunchies are back and why.” Some of Jacobson’s observations are too casually tossed-off—“Starbucks might be more known for their bathrooms than their coffee"; “Do you think Ross-and-Rachel situations are happening all over the place?”—but many of the sketches are reminiscent of Nora Ephron in their sharp-edged goofiness, as when she concludes a piece on failed love with this: “I did what any intelligent, responsible, sane person would do. I got a dog.”
Charting the charms and obstacles in the everyday, Jacobson’s book wobbles here and there, but it’s mostly a pleasure to read.Pub Date: Oct. 30, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5387-1329-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2018
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 2026 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.
