A memoir of bilious excess, related with humor and just the right amount of acidic sadness.
Wannabe writer gets sidetracked from the literary life by the Internet ’90s.
Goodwillie’s fresh and invigorating debut opens at Kenyon College, where his half-baked writerly dreams are unexpectedly derailed when he winds up as the star of the little school’s previously DOA baseball team. Come graduation time, he’s being scouted by the majors. When that doesn’t work out, it’s off to the Big Apple, where he hopes to get a little of what he’d gone to Kenyon for: “the lure of a literary existence.” He finds a bunch of his old friends; a job as a private investigator researching Mafia shakedowns in Chinatown; an on-again, off-again coke habit; and a Cuban roommate named Gus who works as a press agent for Mayor Rudy Giuliani but somehow knows more about the literary world than Goodwillie does. The book unfolds like the life of many casting-about recent grads: in fits and starts, demarcated by new jobs and new relationships, strung together in a haze of bars. The author moves, by luck and accident, from being a private investigator to writing catalogue copy for a sports-memorabilia auction house to working as a sports researcher at Sotheby’s (“holding pen for the unmarried children of well-known families”). Then he joins a succession of high-flying Internet startups, and we feel the steam gathering for the millennial explosion of irrational exuberance. Goodwillie tries to hang on to his literary dreams, publishing an investigative piece here, a short story there, rooming with an apocalyptically depressed screenwriter. But mostly, he just gets sucked into the fantasy of easy money. When the collapse finally comes, he has the sense not to wallow in self-pity, relying instead on a congenial tone of self-mockery and smart, finely tuned storytelling.
A memoir of bilious excess, related with humor and just the right amount of acidic sadness.Pub Date: June 2, 2006
ISBN: 1-56512-465-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
