If readers can get past Cardiff’s irritating efforts to constantly demonstrate her own cleverness, they may find some...
A 20-something editor and writer's unapologetically snarky sex memoir that is “not about [her] sex life.”
In a book that is as disturbing as it is funny, Cardiff explores the absurd and at times bizarre events that have defined her journey to sexual experience. She begins with a description of recurring sexual nightmares she had as a child, which involved the singer Prince and a gigantic purple tricycle. Precocious but without any real knowledge of what sex was, she drew pictures of genital-eating piranhas and “Satan and the angel Gabriel sword-fighting with their huge penises” for the express purpose of getting kicked out of her catechism class. Carnal knowledge came to her unbidden, first through a porn film that she accidentally found on TV during a sleepover and then through homemade sex tapes that she discovered at a Thanksgiving family get-together. Cardiff grew into a graceless adolescence, where she fell for an older man with a penchant for seducing underage girls and eventually lost her virginity to a boy she got to know in the wake of a postponed orgy. In college, she pursued her sexual bliss with a guilt-ridden Mormon and experienced a moment of near-mystical enlightenment on the nature of dating and love in a Denver strip club. A move to New York allowed her to witness human sexuality in all its mayhem. In one essay, she describes an encounter with a man “lying on the sidewalk trying to orally pleasure a dead baby bird.”
If readers can get past Cardiff’s irritating efforts to constantly demonstrate her own cleverness, they may find some interesting observations about human sexual foibles, but not much else.Pub Date: July 2, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-59240-786-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Gotham Books
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2013
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
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
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