The moments of genuine humor are few and far between, and the book mostly falls flat as a dull recounting of a former teen...
Former teen TV star attempts self-deprecating humor to tell PG-rated tales in this occasionally chuckle-worthy debut memoir.
Best known for playing everyone’s favorite girl-next-door crush, Topanga Lawrence, in the 1990s sitcom Boy Meets World, Fishel writes that she was “born with a serious case of the klutzes.” In chapters with titles like “The Poop Whisperer,” “Walk Much?” and “I Heart You With All My Fart,” the author regales readers with stories of embarrassing moments throughout her life, from falling off a Big Wheel bike as a child to tripping down a hill in front of Ben Affleck. Fishel loosely outlines her life with anecdotes about bad dates, catastrophic casting calls and cleaning up after her sick dog. The book is set equally in Fishel’s life as a teen star and her adult life, and devoted fans will be pleased to read about her personal life since Boy Meets World, which includes a marriage and a college degree. While there are a few tidbits from Fishel’s teenage years that die-hard ’90s TV fans might find juicy, most of the anecdotes are just familiar renditions of normal growing pains. The author writes with heavy-handed sarcasm that rarely inspires laughs and often addresses readers directly with hints of self-promotion—“Do you follow me on Twitter yet? Well, if you do, (1) bravo!” and (2) you may have figured out by now that I am obsessed with dogs.” Compared to other female celebrities who have successfully written comedic memoirs, Fishel has neither the skilled voice of Tina Fey nor the over-the-top adventures of Chelsea Handler. The best moments come when Fishel writes vulnerably but frankly about larger cultural topics such as body image or her teenage romance with Lance Bass, who later publicly came out as gay.
The moments of genuine humor are few and far between, and the book mostly falls flat as a dull recounting of a former teen celebrity’s unremarkable personal antics.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2014
ISBN: 978-1476760230
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
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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