Engrossing, frightening and ultimately hopeful.
Broderick narrates his long, disastrous immersion in alcohol and drug abuse in this bruising but oddly entertaining memoir, limning scenes of sickening degradation with charm and humor.
The author, an Irish émigré, plunges the reader into the bleary secret society of erstwhile Emerald Islander construction workers. It’s a booze-filled, ultra-macho fraternity of stupefyingly hard drinkers who somehow manage to get through a day of hard labor despite crippling hangovers; drinking continuously on the job apparently dulls the pain a bit. An aspiring writer—unsurprisingly, Charles Bukowski is a particular inspiration—Broderick struggled to complete novels and short stories, dabbled with theater and ran a used bookshop in a touching attempt to join New York’s literary community. But answering the siren song of vodka and cocaine required the steady paycheck promised by construction work, and Broderick became caught in a nauseating cycle of blackouts, car crashes and violent encounters with drug dealers. His workmates were colorful, brawny Irish lads with livers of steel and a passion for partying and creative insults. Broderick cannily manages to convey the sheer fun of drinking to excess and living in a perpetual Bacchanal—his story would be infuriating and incomprehensible without this sense of blissful adventure—which makes the horrifying final stages of his rake’s progress all the more grim. The author’s voice is effortlessly engaging and funny, accounting for the unlikely bevy of beautiful young women helpless before his charms. His battle with the eponymous Orangutan, the personification of the inhuman thing that occupies his body while under the influence, also has a perverse buddy-comedy kick. Broderick does some yeoman reportage on the changing face of New York during the ’90s and ’00s, painting the city as a dangerously exciting playground irresistible to a certain species of self-destructive romantic.
Engrossing, frightening and ultimately hopeful.Pub Date: Dec. 29, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-307-45340-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Three Rivers/Crown
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2009
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
PERSPECTIVES
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