A dour and narcissistic Seinfeldian exercise.
A Debbie Downer pontificates on the minutiae of her daily life.
Sunday Times Magazine contributor Leve apparently likes only two things: drinking coffee and talking on the phone. But even those things have their problems. She worries, for example, that the deli proprietor has customers to whom he pays more attention, or that he’ll be disappointed in her when he delivers her order. Though she loves talking on the phone to close friends, she also acknowledges that she’s much better over e-mail. Such is her essentially pleasureless existence, and in a series of short vignettes, she chronicles the things she hates—sunny Saturdays, dinner parties (in New York, though London ones are marginally better), most other parties, boyfriends, not having boyfriends, trying new things, surprises, giving gifts, wedding receptions and so on. She fantasizes about living alone in the middle of nowhere, so she doesn’t have to interact with people, and quips that the best kind of boyfriend might be on death row—guaranteed to be a bigger loser than she is. A rampant hypochondriac, she frets about hair loss, complains about her gynecologist and, like the rest of America, has problems with her health insurance. There are witty moments, particularly the stories about her oddball cast of friends and acquaintances, but there’s so much idle complaining to wade through that it’s difficult to focus on them. The New York neurotic has always been a source of comedy, but even Woody Allen and Tina Fey are happy some of the time, which keeps them likable.
A dour and narcissistic Seinfeldian exercise.Pub Date: April 13, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-186459-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2010
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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