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DEAR GIRLS

INTIMATE TALES, UNTOLD SECRETS & ADVICE FOR LIVING YOUR BEST LIFE

A down-to-earth collection that is raw but not irreverent.

The comedian, actor, and writer distills years of advice into letters to her daughters.

In her first book, Wong—whose Netflix stand-up specials, Hard Knock Wife and Baby Cobra, earned her a massive following—details how she met her husband; pregnancy, childbirth, and the messy chaos of parenting; New York during her early stand-up career, when bombing on stage honed her talents; her Vietnamese/Chinese upbringing; time at UCLA; and study abroad in Hanoi. Throughout these topical letters, her trademark candor is equal parts crass about sex, tender about her family's sacrifices, and sober about miscarriage, among other pains. A few letters are composed as lighthearted lists, including how to host a cheaper wedding: “Buy your dress on eBay,” and “Get your hair done at a blow-out bar.” On spotting authentic Asian restaurants, she writes, “Ninety-nine percent of the clientele should be Asian." The author’s accounts of her initial forays into the comedy business and brushes with famous people add color and demonstrate the necessity of hard work, but it’s behind-the-scenes memories of Wong’s past that stand out for their pointed depiction of a Bay Area immigrant family. Her mother’s unsentimental love, which the author grew to understand after visiting Vietnam herself, is palpable. Wong also lays bare her young adult years, rife with dating disasters, with amusing self-mockery. Digressions on womanhood are refreshing in their nuances, and pride mixes with conviction in the power of expanding comedy beyond an Asian audience. An afterword by Wong’s husband gives insight on what it’s like to fuel someone else’s jokes. Under the raunchy writing—much of which repeats the highlights of Wong’s act—there's familiar, reassuring optimism. About her mother, she writes, "she did her best to make me tough….She will always be there for me.” Wong brings the same dedication here, where mistakes inspire wisecracking wisdom.

A down-to-earth collection that is raw but not irreverent.

Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-525-50883-0

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2019

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

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WHEN BREATH BECOMES AIR

A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...

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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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