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DRINKING AND TWEETING

AND OTHER BRANDI BLUNDERS

Frothy, straightforward and surprisingly addictive.

The reality TV star's account of her ex-husband's philandering, the effects of their divorce and custody battle on their two young sons, and her rocky path to dating and newfound fame and confidence.

Noted for her hilarious zingers and cat fights on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, the show's crassest, most unfiltered star hasn't qualified as an actual housewife since her 2010 divorce. At the end of a 13-year relationship with TV actor Eddie Cibrian, who's appeared on shows including CSI: Miami, Glanville discovered her husband was cheating on her with multiple women. He wed one, country singer LeAnn Rimes, in 2011, and Glanville has struggled to come to terms with their romance and to co-parent with a man who's refused to give her his phone number. Due to Rimes' fame, as well as the fact that she, too, was married at the time of the affair, messy details surrounding Glanville and Cibrian's split provided endless tabloid fodder, as did Glanville's unrestrained comments to reporters and angry behavior that led to, among other actions, her slashing the tires of Cibrian's motorcycles. Glanville insists that the dissolution of her marriage was her decision, not Cibrian's, and she airs all of his dirty laundry and lies. A former model, Glanville is certainly no writer—she was assisted by Hollywood Reporter contributor Bruce—but her effervescent voice and often shocking candor help make her stories at least entertaining. In the notoriously superficial Hollywood social scene, Glanville stands out for her willingness to be vulnerable and even to look bad; she admits to plastic surgery and a DUI arrest and looks back at her mistakes with regret. She offers no apology for who she is, and her personality, love it or hate it, comes across as authentic.

Frothy, straightforward and surprisingly addictive.

Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2013

ISBN: 978-1-4767-0762-4

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: March 30, 2013

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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WHEN BREATH BECOMES AIR

A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...

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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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