Frank, funny and revealing of relations between—and among—the sexes.
A 30-something comedic actress explores her sexual orientation.
Attracted to women from a young age, as an adult, Azzoni found herself not only a card-carrying member of the Brooklyn lesbian community, but, after claiming the Miss Lez beauty-pageant title, its veritable poster child. “I couldn’t have been gayer,” she writes. “I cat-sat, drank herbal tea, and in high school played field hockey. I’d been both vegan and vegetarian. I was a food co-op member. I drove a stick shift. As a kid I undressed Barbie and Skipper and made them kiss and touch boobs. I was even allergic to nuts.” Consequently, the author was shocked when, one day in yoga class, the embrace of her yoga instructor left her breathless with desire for him. That brief encounter ignited Azzoni’s curiosity to become intimately involved with men. In often-hilarious detail, the author recounts her daring voyage into the dizzying cosmos of hetero dating. What sets this account apart from the typical mildly ironic coming-of-age chick-lit memoir is Azzoni’s bald examination of how acting on this “newfound man-lust” would rock not only her sense of self but her station in the gay community: “What if I were truly attracted to men?” she writes. “Would I still have a place in my world? Could I betray the very people who had cheered me on as Miss Lez? I was reluctant to forfeit the rewards of coming out in the first place.” Readers will appreciate the candor of the author’s admission to fearing that her attraction to men might drive her back into the closet with the very friends who, like her, had struggled to get out of it.
Frank, funny and revealing of relations between—and among—the sexes.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-58005-361-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Seal Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2011
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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