Garrett's celebrity status and comic take on the second half of life will draw readers in, but his occasionally hateful...
A clarion call to men pushing 50 from "an optimistic pessimist."
In this memoir/essay collection, three-time Emmy Award winner (Everybody Loves Raymond) and first-time author Garrett urges readers to embrace the second half of life. “If you try to oversteer the inevitable course of life,” he writes, “you will ruin the journey.” In his characteristic anxiety-ridden and morose fashion, Garrett tells outrageous tales of his upbringing (at 15, he impersonated Jimmie Walker at a bar mitzvah, in blackface), his fledgling stand-up career, and reaching the pinnacle of success as a Las Vegas headliner and with a role on a long-running sitcom. Much of Garrett's stage act consists of mocking others, which he defends as noninjurious and ultimately good-natured—what he admires most in renowned, veteran insult comic Don Rickles—since he is so self-deprecating. However, because he isn't particularly clever or nearly as incisive as other aggressive comedians, such as George Carlin or Joan Rivers, he occasionally comes across as an angry jerk. A drastic tonal change emerges midway through when he describes the helplessness of men in romantic relationships. He isn't sardonic or wise but rather resentful and sometimes mean-spirited. Eventually, though, Garrett's anger dissipates and his unaffected humor emerges in his storytelling—e.g., when he recounts his preposterous attempt at folding his massive frame into the sports car that represented his midlife crisis. He also chronicles how he tried to break his Bernese mountain dog of a particularly nasty habit, and when describing his Jewish father's religious conversion (an old lobster tank served as a baptismal font), his tone is exasperated yet warm.
Garrett's celebrity status and comic take on the second half of life will draw readers in, but his occasionally hateful diatribes might put some of them off.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4767-7290-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
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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