Autobiography as gaping grin—nary an honest moment to be glimpsed.
The man they called Knight Rider covers his life in standard greatest-hits format.
Even given the meager expectations aroused by celebrity autobiography—a cheery narrative arc laced with a modicum of self-deprecation and the occasional bit of gossip—this relentlessly cheery account still manages to disappoint. Known in these post-ironic days as the Hoff (the logo from a T-shirt he sells via the “Hoff World” website), Hasselhoff launched his career in 1975 when he landed a role on The Young and the Restless. He caught the eye of NBC’s Brandon Tartikoff, who put him in ’80s touchstone Knight Rider, a block of televisual cheese co-starring a snooty talking car with an oscillating red-light scanner for an eye. Next came Baywatch, at one point the most popular TV show in the world, which cemented the Hoff’s status as a world pop-culture star. Success was confirmed when he headlined cheeseball concerts that pulled in massive crowds of Europeans. While the account of his TV exploits soon bores, his story of playing to fame-dazed East Germans in 1989 offers a moment of surreal magnificence. (His song “Looking for Freedom” became an anthem of the post-Wall era.) Readers can hardly turn a bright and sunny page without seeing the Hoff grasp another great opportunity or a sick child needing a celebrity visit pick-me-up. Oh, he encounters occasional speed bumps like divorces and near-death from alcohol poisoning, but he’s soon off and running again: starring on Broadway in Jekyll and Hyde: The Musical and becoming an even odder icon with his stunningly popular SpongeBob SquarePants cameo. Nothing keeps the Hoff down, it seems.
Autobiography as gaping grin—nary an honest moment to be glimpsed.Pub Date: May 15, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-312-37129-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2007
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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