A boozy holler of a book, with a great soundtrack.
The Dartmouth frat escapades of the National Lampoon writer whose experiences inspired the film Animal House.
The Alpha Delta Phi house at Dartmouth was called “Animal House” for a number of reasons, the most famous of which involved some members who were haplessly chasing a chicken around the yard (eager to kill it for dinner), only to be brought up short when an upperclassman (known as “The Man”) plugged the chicken with a .45 slug from his upstairs room. Unfortunately for readers of Miller's biography about his sophomore Dartmouth year in 1960 at the AD house, nothing quite that eventful happens—it's action-packed but mostly of the binge-drinking, puking, pissing and trying-to-get-laid variety. Miller was a smart-ass gentile from the Long Island suburbs with a yen for girls, obscure rock 45s and Yiddish slang who found himself at home with the ADs, who treasured drinking and the bestowing of nicknames (Miller's is “Pinto”). The author writes that what “cartoon characters and AD brothers had in common was their exuberance,” a truism he proves time and again throughout these raucous, bleary pages where schoolwork is but a vague concern and the unceasing bacchanal is everything. Written in a juvenile, slangy rush, Miller's book has energy to spare. The stories are related mostly in streams of obscene dialogue and are focused on activities centered either immediately above or below the waist. There's a time limit on such behavior, of course, given the ADs' “amused cynicism about all human activity [and] Dadaistic displays of sociopathic behavior in public spaces,” and the attraction begins to pall at about the halfway point, not long after Miller/Pinto starts referring to himself in the third person. For Animal House completists, be assured, one can find here most of the film's raw elements, from the road trip, the band playing “Shout!” and even the Dean's decision to put the house on an unprecedented “triple warning.”
A boozy holler of a book, with a great soundtrack.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-316-05701-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2006
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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