A mildly compelling celebrity memoir primarily for fans of the author’s podcast.
The comedic actress and podcaster reflects on her career journey and offers advice on relationships.
In the effusive foreword to his wife’s book, actor Chris Pratt notes that a similarity they share is their reliance on people’s tendency to underestimate them—a possible hint for readers to anticipate something more than the routine narrative that follows. Faris, best known for her roles in the Scary Movie franchise and the TV sitcom Mom, does little to raise the bar of what can best be described as equal parts Hollywood coming-of-age story and celebrity-as-relationship-adviser brand-building exercise. The author’s background story is fairly uneventful. She grew up in a Seattle suburb in a loving, supportive family. In high school and college, she appeared in a few local stage productions, which sparked a continued interest in acting, leading to auditions and minor film and TV work. After falling in love with a co-star from an early film, Ben Indra, she followed him to Hollywood, where she landed a few breakout film roles. Her eventual marriage to Indra didn’t work out, but shortly thereafter, she met Pratt, and their relationship quickly blossomed and continues to endure. As a writer, Faris has her moments. She has an engaging voice and is capable of expressing a distinct point of view. She is most affecting in her occasionally bittersweet reflections, as she recounts stories about working in the industry, her anxieties and frustrations about auditioning, and the personal challenges of dealing with aging in Hollywood (she recently turned 40). Unfortunately, there are far too many self-conscious references to the fact that she’s writing her first book. Her story is also loaded with unnecessary filler—e.g., chapters revolving around relationship themes and advice from her popular podcast Unqualified and random lists (“Sex on the Beach and Thirteen Other Things that Sound Better Than They Are”) that are presumably intended to engage her podcast audience.
A mildly compelling celebrity memoir primarily for fans of the author’s podcast.Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-101-98642-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Aug. 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
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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