Chatty, breezy and often hilarious: an enjoyable reminder that it’s best not to take things like the “blood-sucking undead”...
NPR contributor Nuzum (Parental Advisory: Music Censorship in America, 2001) humorously sinks his teeth into the elusive, enshrouded world of vampirism.
He launches his quest for immersion in vampirism with a clumsy attempt to drink his own blood from a shot glass. Then he watches every vampire movie ever made—605 in all. Conclusion? “They suck.” Attempting “to understand what it means to be a vampire,” he spends a thankless weekend playing one in a local haunted house. At home in Washington, D.C., Nuzum conducts an unrevealing interview with a wily group of self-declared vampires initially contacted via Meetup.com. In California, a plucky guide who calls herself Countess Mina—“Mina Harker from the novel…turned into a vampire and then sent to San Francisco by Count Dracula himself”—energetically dispels “a lot of Hollywood’s lies” in her vampire-themed tours. Nuzum joins an eclectic group hosted by former child actor Butch Patrick, who played Eddie Munster on TV, for a trek through the ominous castles and monasteries of central Romania to discover the real history of torturous prince Vlad Dracula. Wife Katherine comes along on a brisk jaunt to England to view historic Highgate Cemetery and the significant Whitby Abbey. Less interesting are visits to the topless vampire revue Bite in Las Vegas and a party thrown by the curiously aloof “vampyre society of greater New York,” aka the Court of Lazarus. Nor do Nuzum’s frequent detours from bats and fangs to address issues like AIDS, bareback sex, Netflix, etc., really gel with all the blood facts, word origins and extensive meditations on Bram Stoker and his Dracula. Still, you have to admire a guy who adroitly plods through episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and a Dark Shadows convention, all the while disbursing such random footnotes as, “there never was anyone named Count Dracula.”
Chatty, breezy and often hilarious: an enjoyable reminder that it’s best not to take things like the “blood-sucking undead” too seriously.Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-312-37111-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2007
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 2026 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.
