The flamboyant talk show host delivers an entirely expected book: a glitzy, glamorous, goofy look at 365 days of a charmed...
Cable TV’s dishiest guy at his dishy best.
Depending on whom you ask, the brainchild behind Bravo’s Real Housewives franchise and Watch What Happens Live—as well as the network’s former head of development—is either a parody of a talk show host or a true TV original. Those kinds of against-the-grain personalities generally elicit a loyal fan base, and Cohen (Most Talkative: Stories From the Front Lines of Pop Culture, 2012) is no exception. In the crowded late-night landscape, his ratings remain solid, and he always lines up quality guests to do “shotskis” in his studio. His second book is a straight-up diary that his fans will relish and detractors will ignore. However, part of what makes Cohen so appealing on the page is his humility. He’s well-aware of his position as a TV anomaly and often displays a gee-whiz attitude about his brushes with fame. In discussing a particularly star-filled week on WWHL, he admits, “For Cher I was excited but with Oprah I was nervous, actually shaking for an hour before the show.” But everything isn’t campy and fabulous: The author’s story of his encounter with Conan O’Brien, in which the veteran host talked the newbie over some bumps, is almost touching, and his love for his dog is sweet and relatable. Cohen spends a lot of time discussing Housewives, so if you are not a fan of that particular franchise, parts of the narrative will drag. But not to worry: You’re never more than a page or two away from some dish about Lady Gaga, Emma Stone, David Letterman and a host of other celebrities.
The flamboyant talk show host delivers an entirely expected book: a glitzy, glamorous, goofy look at 365 days of a charmed showbiz life.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-62779-228-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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
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