These books will keep going as well, as long as there’s a market for them.
A third volume of memoir from the street-wise, no-filter comedian, assisted again by Bozza.
By his own admission, Lange (Crash and Burn, 2013, etc.) is a self-destructive overachiever, two qualities that wouldn’t seem to go together but for him are flip sides of the same coin. “I get the same jolt of adrenaline when I lose as I do when I win,” he insists. “That’s because when I lose, I lose big. My losses are like a huge ship passing by, trailing a wake of chaos, and there I am, having the time of my life, just an asshole on a Jet Ski catching air off the backwash.” He took a big risk when he left steady work for show business, a field where he’d shown no aptitude, and he reaped big rewards for it. Lange writes that he was by no means the funniest guy in his high school and that he was awkward at stand-up, but he eventually found himself in a high-profile position as a radio accomplice to Howard Stern, which opened doors to all sorts of opportunities. These included plenty of sex with strippers and porn stars, who wanted to hear their names on the show (and their websites promoted), which helped torpedo his relationship with his girlfriend (which was also a running part of the show). The author now dismisses Stern’s show as “the perfect example of how political correctness has ruined comedy. His show is so unbelievably safe, boring and just bad.” Some of the episodes that highlighted Lange’s previous books are revisited here, but his extracurricular misadventures with the HBO series Crashing shows that he isn’t mellowing with older age. “My life is basically a misconceived Hollywood film,” he writes. “It’s not as bad as Lost and Found [the movie he considers his worst]; it’s a different kind of bad. It’s the kind of movie that should end but keeps going.”
These books will keep going as well, as long as there’s a market for them.Pub Date: July 17, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-12117-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
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
PERSPECTIVES
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