Casual, zingy observations.
A compendium of lighthearted, of-the-moment essays that address the many ups and downs of life at 50. The former co-host of Dinner and a Movie on TBS, humorist Gurwitch (co-author: You Say Tomato, I Say Shut Up: A Love Story, 2010, etc.) opens her new collection by lamenting the onslaught of AARP solicitations (“At a glance, I thought it might be an ad for white-collar prison uniforms”) that began showing up on her 49th birthday. On almost every page, she demonstrates a dogged commitment to elevating seemingly normal, even mundane happenings, such as buying moisturizer at the mall, and other encounters with people who include her husband, writer Jeff Kahn, and female friends, into situational comedies, frequently offering jokes at her own expense. Gurwitch makes for a highly likable, albeit sometimes-crass narrator who is willing to lay all of her cards on the table for the sake of entertainment. Infused with levity, confessions of her fears about getting older mostly relate to the way she looks and the lengths to which she's willing to go to fight gravity. Her neuroses show up in abundance—e.g., a monologue questioning whether or not washing fruit before eating it may lead to her death. “Pesticides are undoubtedly eating away at my insides this very minute, though statistically speaking, I will probably be bumped off by a teenage driver texting What’s up?" These obsessive, superficial fears tap into similar threads running through most glossy women's magazines. Having written for many such magazines, including Glamour and More, Gurwitch proves adept at attempting to address and soften readers' shared concerns about their own age-related changes in appearance with her aggressively personal (some R-rated) deadpan admissions (“In the light of day, our living room couch looks depressed. Literally. That sofa has seen a lot of ass”).
Casual, zingy observations.Pub Date: March 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-399-16618-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Blue Rider Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2014
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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