A mixed bag that calls for less goody-good and either more substance or more laughs.
Quondam movie actor and, latterly, deadpan TV pundit Grodin (How I Get Through Life, 1992, etc.) returns with more behind-the-scenes and in-front-of-the-camera reminiscences.
In this latest undemanding text, as before, the author never forgets a name to drop or a slight to resent. Despite his heightened sense of morality, his book has the bite and consistency of tepid oatmeal, with just a few laughs for raisins. Grodin’s on the side of niceness, of course, very high on “appropriate” behavior, and down on all “hurtful” activity. (He likes those two adjectives in particular). His high-toned agenda is certainly blameless. His sense of morality, however, is better developed than his skill at avoiding the tone of a jejune college application essay. Why, he wonders, do people behave badly? The recounting of his career as a TV performer is inoffensive material in the fan-club genre, more engaging, perhaps, than much of his previous offerings. And transcripts of televised comedy bits—like the routines with comic Jon Lovitz or vaudevillian Joey Faye—are admittedly funny. To his further credit, Chuck Grodin isn’t Don Imus. Even better, he’s the anti–Howard Stern. Those fellas have engaged in inappropriate, even hurtful activity, we are advised, while earnest Chuck, ever doing right, worked his way through cable, hosting O.J. Simpson seminars in the time slot following Geraldo. His story of the beleaguered journey from co-star with a St. Bernard to current gig as an ersatz Andy Rooney on network TV is inevitably self-serving celebrity excelsior. To be fair, maybe the author’s mind wandered a bit in the writing of this largely self-centered fluff. The reader’s mind may wander a bit, too.
A mixed bag that calls for less goody-good and either more substance or more laughs.Pub Date: May 28, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-50784-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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