A book that hopefully marks the beginning of a fruitful writing career.
A quirky book of personal essays by a successful Hollywood professional.
Many recognize Lahti as the acclaimed actress who has received Oscar, Emmy, and Golden Globe awards for her outstanding performances in countless moving female roles. In her first book, the author launches into the literary world with the same dynamism that has enlivened her acting roles. “Many of these stories are told through the lens of my ever-evolving feminism,” she writes, “the lens through which I see just about everything….I’ve been a clumsy feminist, finding solid footing only to be knocked down again. And I keep finding new veils to be lifted.” With brazen honesty, Lahti recounts the many surprising, heartbreaking, and identity-building events that have punctuated her life. From her earliest childhood memories to her 1960s rebel heart to the launch of her career to more intimate admissions about her acting and mothering techniques, the author crafts an enjoyable book that only requires from readers a willingness to believe, participate, laugh, and grow along with her. Though she identifies herself as a clumsy feminist multiple times, there’s nothing clumsy about her feminism. She is adaptable to the changing sociopolitical climates and never shies away from being challenged by the younger women close to her. “These millennials have taught me that their ‘pro-sex feminism’ is the undeniable next step in empowerment,” she writes. “If men choose to regard them as ‘objects,’ tough shit, that is their problem.” Given the level of Lahti’s success, it is refreshing to read a book of essays that oozes modesty, humor, and complete levelheadedness. The author’s compelling and thought-provoking stories effectively reflect her wisdom as well as her desire to share that wisdom and to keep learning throughout her life. As she writes, “I see this collection as the highs and lows of a feminist who is very much still a work in progress.”
A book that hopefully marks the beginning of a fruitful writing career.Pub Date: April 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-266367-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Harper Wave
Review Posted Online: Jan. 7, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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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