The market for this sophomoric book likely consists of men who don’t read many others.
Another comedian extends his brand to the printed page.
Though stand-up comics once shared their material primarily in clubs, onstage, the career has gone multiplatform: social media, viral video, TV development deals, film projects and, once sufficient name recognition has been achieved, a book deal. Kreischer doesn’t really have a book in him, and by his account, it’s unlikely that he’s read many, for pleasure at least. On his honeymoon, someone offered him a James Patterson novel, but he didn’t see how that could add to the fun of the beach and the booze. (The opening line of the book is, “Bong hits are like strippers: they’re best shared with a group of friends.”) Some books within the expanding genre of comedian memoir help aspiring readers learn how to emulate the career progression or at least illuminate what sort of character traits are likely to lead to success. Kreischer’s path was singular—while still in college (six years without graduating), he received a cold call from a Rolling Stone reporter who wanted a tour guide to partying on campus, which turned into an extended feature in the magazine on the premier party animal, which inspired the movie National Lampoon’s Van Wilder, which led to comedy clubs and TV programs. Many of his stories are like many other peoples’ stories—fumbling adolescent sex, frat hazing, drugs and drinking—balanced by what appears to be surprising maturity as a husband and father, though he’s not above using his daughters for jokes that might make other fathers cringe: “I hope [they] will take advantage of all that college has to offer (except, obviously, for the designer drugs and virginity-saving anal sex).”
The market for this sophomoric book likely consists of men who don’t read many others.Pub Date: May 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-250-03025-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: April 7, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
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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