A truth-telling tour conducted by an agile guide.
The first openly gay comedian to perform on the Tonight Show delivers a collection of witty essays exploring his remarkable career and life.
Since 2007, Smith, a successful comedian and author of both nonfiction and fiction (Remembrance of Things I Forgot, 2011, etc.), has lived with Lou Gehrig’s disease, and even though he now communicates through his iPad, his wit is as sharp as ever: “I’d like to tell God what a dick he is for creating ALS and punch him—if I could still make a fist.” In his latest book, he writes about being a father, his past romantic encounters, his love of animals, his group of close friends he calls the Nature Boys, and his career as a comedian. Smith’s love of nature started early when he received a subscription to the children’s version of National Geographic. Engaging with the environment and all its delights and discomforts forms the core of the narrative, offering observations on a variety of natural environments and details about his trips to Santa Fe, the Malibu hills, Alaska, and Canyon de Chelly in Arizona. Each essay provides a glimpse into Smith’s thought processes on diverse subjects, including how to confront homophobic hecklers while on stage, the joys of parenthood, and his love of “all things Native American.” Smith concedes that though his disease has been a trial, it has given him the opportunity to speak openly about any topic he wishes. “I was now blessed with a free pass to discuss all religions and beliefs after I was forced to confront the fact that my relation to the universe might expire,” he writes. Though the author holds strong opinions, his essays are funny and intimate without being self-indulgent. Never moving too far from his comedic nature, Smith delivers one-liners throughout, and nothing is off-limits.
A truth-telling tour conducted by an agile guide.Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-299-31050-9
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Univ. of Wisconsin
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016
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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