An amusing romp, but Leifer is capable of delivering more.
Humorous essays on aging from the stand-up comic and former writer for Seinfeld, The Larry Sanders Show and Saturday Night Live.
Her father’s death prompted Leifer to review the twists and turns of her life. She recounts falling in love with another woman at 40, a breast-cancer scare, menopause and the adoption of a newborn son at 50. The most successful essay, “Two by Two Starts with One by One,” describes her life-changing decision to cohabitate with her partner and her partner’s pets. The promise shown there is echoed in “The I in ‘Team’ ” and “Five Lessons of Animal Adoption,” although these pieces ultimately travel much of the same ground. Most of the remaining material doles out predictable reassurance (“you are so much more than you think”), interspersed with the occasional bizarre gem (“I have become my own ass’s bitch”). Attempting to pass a light touch over these highly charged topics, Leifer too often sacrifices substance for the sake of a good one-liner. Like the subtitle, the jokes can become too precious. In the first essay, a tribute to her deceased father, she writes, “I see now that as a child a lot of ‘looking up to your parents’ has to do with height.” This wisecrack might work in a stand-up routine, but on the page it’s not entirely credible. The author tosses off one solid joke after another; if she’d kept mining she might have unearthed deeper insights.
An amusing romp, but Leifer is capable of delivering more.Pub Date: March 31, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-345-50296-4
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2009
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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