A smart, engaging book for the completist that only suffers from being a touch too complete; it could have lost 100 pages...
Help us, Obi-wan: There’s a Star Wars sequel looming, and it may just feature—shudder—Jar Jar Binks.
If you’re a real fan of the Star Wars series, observes Mashable deputy editor Taylor, then you’re likely a hater, whether of Jar Jar or of “the whiny delivery of Mark Hamill” or of those damnably cute Ewoks. George Lucas has given us plenty to hate, though the spectacle of a young, bikini-clad Carrie Fisher lashed to the post is probably not one of those things, even if, in that garb, she’s been turned into a doll for sale to the perverted and the innocent-minded alike. More to the point, as Taylor notes in his opening pages, there’s scarcely a corner of the world that isn’t aware at least dimly of Star Wars; one of the series has even been dubbed into Navajo in time for one of the last of the old-time Code Talkers to see it before moving on to another galaxy. Taylor’s book feels occasionally like an assemblage of oddments and statistics, but mostly he stays right on track in charting how Star Wars moved from film to meme to near universal standard cultural referent. (Say, “I’m your father” in a James Earl Jones voice in just about any language, and the audience will get it.) Better than that is the author’s account of the origins of the series and his look at what Star Wars has wrought over the last four decades, including a true revolution in many aspects of filmmaking. If Lucas had died in the car crash he suffered in 1962, Taylor notes, then among other things, Hollywood would be “without much of a special effects industry.”
A smart, engaging book for the completist that only suffers from being a touch too complete; it could have lost 100 pages easily. Still, welcome reading for fans of Star Wars—or, for that matter, of THX 1138.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-465-08998-7
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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