Painfully honest and self-deprecating to the point of discomfort.
Best known for his work in Sex and the City and The West Wing, full-time character actor and part-time author Handler follows up his gripping memoir about surviving cancer (Time on Fire, 1996) with a collection of autobiographical essays.
They cover topics ranging from acting and psychotherapy to dating and selling an engagement ring; approximately half the essays are connected to his illness. Beating leukemia was obviously a defining moment for the author, and it’s hardly fair to criticize him for writing, often touchingly, about the experience. Still, the woe-is-me percentage is relatively high, and Handler’s self-pitying (and periodic self-flagellation) grows difficult to read by the book’s final third. Nonetheless, it has some fine moments. “Menace to Society” is a cockeyed, High Fidelity-esque rundown of notable girlfriends, and the author’s honesty about his roller-coaster love life is admirable. “My Life Story,” which details the attempt to translate Time on Fire into a screenplay, provides memorable entrée into the head of a writer (a scary place to be, as all writers know). Handler’s prose is readable, sometimes even clever: “When I was first shown the collection of buildings my father-in-law owns in Molinella, a small town in northern Italy,” he writes, “I immediately began calculating how much longer he might live.” The primary problem here is that the author seems like a decent person, but not necessarily the kind of guy with whom readers want to spend nearly 300 pages. His brutally frank and blisteringly angry debut was far more compelling.
Painfully honest and self-deprecating to the point of discomfort.Pub Date: May 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59448-995-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2008
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
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