A fervent, entertaining journey back to a time when print media still mattered.
A valedictory hymn to the daily newspaper, composed by a lifelong journalist who began his career cranking carbon paper into newsroom typewriters and now blogs from his laptop.
CNN contributor Greene, who has written for decades on American culture and politics (When We Get to Surf City: A Journey Through America in Pursuit of Rock and Roll, Friendship, and Dreams, 2008, etc.)—launched his career in the 1960s as a teen copyboy for the now-defunct Columbus Citizen-Journal. The author begins his account in the fall of 2008 aboard a CNN presidential-campaign bus rolling through Columbus and passing the building where his career had begun. Nostalgia grips him and does not let go for the duration of the book. Though never mawkish, the text follows the emotional coming-of-age story of a misfit who found a roomful of other misfits at the Citizen-Journal. Greene describes his various duties at the paper—summer jobs as copyboy, sportswriter and reporter—while he was in high school and college. He recalls the ecstasy of seeing his words in print for the first time—and, later, his first byline and his first page-one story. He cannot explain some of his early impulses—stepping out on the golf course to walk alongside Arnold Palmer during a tournament (Arnie chatted amiably, gave him a good story), writing and submitting copy without authorization—but it’s his newshound instincts that he is trying to comprehend. Greene most eloquently describes the atmosphere at the Citizen-Journal—the sounds of clacking typewriters and clattering Linotype machines, the clutter and the coffee—and the colorful personalities of his colleagues. He writes of celebrities who drifted through Columbus—Ozzie and Harriet, Nelson Rockefeller—and muses about the incomprehensibility that anything would ever change.
A fervent, entertaining journey back to a time when print media still mattered.Pub Date: July 7, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-312-37530-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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