A National Enquirer–esque peep show of a book partially redeemed by its underlying mission to cultivate awareness about a...
Soap-operatic memoir of a minor screen and TV star's slow descent into booze-fueled hell and her long, slow road back to recovery.
The specter of alcohol and addiction always seemed to dog Babylon 5 actress Christian. Her grandfather had been an alcoholic, and her father was a man who recognized, and walked away from, his penchant for drink. When the author was only 8 years old, her brother was killed by a drunk driver. Fifteen years later, as a young actress living in a Los Angeles apartment, she landed the role of a cocaine addict in the 1988 film Clean and Sober. Christian was not then hooked on either drugs or alcohol, but she was living life in the "Hollywood fast lane," doing "blow," drinking and having indiscriminate sex with both men and women. Until her early 30s, Christian was primarily a recreational drinker. However, after becoming entangled in an emotionally destructive affair with Braveheart actor Angus Macfadyen in 1996, she "drank to escape.” Another bad relationship followed, as did longer and longer stretches of unemployment. By 2002, she had sunk deeply enough into alcoholism that she could no longer control her urges to drink. Neither stints in rehab nor AA meetings helped. On the verge of giving up, she discovered a low-cost alternative treatment, the Sinclair Method, with "an 80 [percent] success rate.” Amazingly, Christian never blames her childhood—which included rape by a neighbor and troubled relationships with her parents—for any of her later mishaps. But neither is she at a loss to tout her "glory days" as a B-list actress or to serve up occasionally entertaining but at times overdone Hollywood dish.
A National Enquirer–esque peep show of a book partially redeemed by its underlying mission to cultivate awareness about a little-known method of alcohol detoxification.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-937856-06-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: BenBella
Review Posted Online: Sept. 22, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2012
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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