Third collection of compact autobiographical essays by the Pulitzer-winning playwright (Some Freaks, 1989; Writing in Restaurants, 1986). The 20 entries here share a tough, masculine flavor: Cigars, guns, beautiful women, and the romance of being a writer on the rise are the commanding notes. Most of the pieces celebrate locales: London, where Mamet scorns the food (``I don't think most Londoners could identify a vegetable with a gun to their head'') but salutes the teahouses; a cabin in Vermont, stinking of wood smoke and kerosene; Cambridge, Mass., where he gripes about recorded music in public places; and, above all, Chicago, home of his boyhood. It was at times a monstrous childhood. In his celebrated flat, precise voice, Mamet records how his stepfather beat his sister, how his grandfather tossed his mother down the stairs. Mamet's deadpan delivery sometimes flowers into hilarity- -for example, the time that he, ``a Nice Jewish Boy,'' was forced to eat platters of fried matzo when all he had in mind was sex on a bearskin rug with his latest conquest. Other essays talk of summer camp, listening to the radio, working in a truck factory, the ``friendly and hospitable fraternity'' of gun-shooting buffs. The characters, mostly men, are unforgettable, even if they appear only for a paragraph—such as Louis Herrmann, eye-doctor brother of composer Bernard Herrmann (``he was a beautiful man''). Once or twice, the prose is so lean that it turns artless—a report from Cannes becomes a laconic dribble bleached of emotion. Mostly, however, things crackle; Mamet offers a tribute to T.H. White's The Goshawk that fits his own work as well: ``The prose is hard and clear as crystal. It is unsentimental, it is simply written, it is a delight and an inspiration.'' Like the title says, not a mansion, not a cape or a ranch, but a cabin of words: bare wood and nails, hammered tight.
Pub Date: Dec. 3, 1992
ISBN: 0-679-41558-0
Page Count: 158
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1992
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.
