Largely pleasant and forgettable, an agreeable-enough diversion lacking in lasting impact.
Comedian and musician Hill delivers a moderately amusing memoir in this collection of comic essays.
The narrative lacks any sort of outsize hook. The author’s tenure on the lower rungs of show business is without scandal, his suburban upbringing seems to have been largely free from trauma and his work and romantic histories are fairly mundane. This leaves Hill’s voice as the sole point of interest, and the author’s wryness is engaging in small doses, but over the long haul the relentless self-deprecation and undercutting of dramatic expectations are wearying. Hill writes about his adolescent hockey career, his time in various rock bands, frustrations with family and girlfriends and other picayune subjects with an unvarying, low-watt comedic rhythm. The pieces are well-observed and deftly rendered, but they never build to anything greater than a good anecdote or a handful of clever lines; they lack strangeness and surprise, the bracingly fresh perspective of an essay by David Sedaris or Jonathan Ames. Hill is a thoroughly conventional “dude,” and, while a fairly witty one, his stories and presentation lack a distinctive flavor. The most memorable pieces deal with his struggle with depression, which he describes with admirable clarity, and an account of his stint working at a homeless shelter, which is enlivened by vividly outrageous characters and an insider’s look at the practical aspects of administrating at an institution that will be unfamiliar to most.
Largely pleasant and forgettable, an agreeable-enough diversion lacking in lasting impact.Pub Date: May 22, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-250-00203-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2012
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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