An amateurish memoir.
Actor, writer and producer Bucatinsky muses on being a gay parent of two adopted children.
Bucatinsky, a co-creator of the Showtime TV series Web Therapy, and his husband, the director and screenwriter Don Roos, adopted a girl, Eliza, in 2005, and a boy, Jonah, in 2007—both from the same mother. The author chronicles the adoption process and the highs and lows of his experiences raising two young children. In the early sections, which focus on the adoptions, the author touches on similar territory as Dan Savage’s 1999 book The Kid (which Bucatinsky mentions approvingly), but where Savage’s book was moving and witty, Bucatinsky’s is mostly shallow and trite. Among his banal observations: that both gay and straight parents argue about how best to raise kids; that married couples have sex less often after kids come along; and that What to Expect When You’re Expecting doesn’t anticipate every parenting question. Bucatinsky obviously thinks that bodily functions are a rich source of comedy, but readers will tire after the fourth or fifth story about urine and/or feces. He also devotes multiple pages to his opinions regarding female genitalia and details a failed attempt to shave his own testicles. Throughout, the author employs a style that suggests an overeager blogger desperate for approval.
An amateurish memoir.Pub Date: June 5, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-6073-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: March 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 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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