Fails to add anything transcendent to the canon of sexual-coming-of-age memoirs.
A real-life Alex Portnoy tells of a childhood penchant for masturbating in public.
The combination of comedic Jewish coming-of-age story and masturbation can’t help but conjure up images of Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint. In Bayme’s debut memoir, the masturbation in question is done by a much younger lad and is a strange combination of introverted self-pleasuring and unintentional exhibitionism referred to as “rocking.” In fact, his first lustful encounter occurred at the age of 6, when he dreamed of tasting the scrumptious wares at his local Dunkin' Donuts, which was strictly forbidden by the edicts of his orthodox Jewish faith. “All I wanted were the simplest pleasures the world had to offer,” writes the author, “but life is unfair when you are a six-year-old Jewish boy.” Whether such statements are honest or ironic is anyone’s guess, but regardless, Bayme goes on to recall the childhood travails of a young kid from the Bronx who rubbed up against inanimate objects at school and at home. He then used pornography to prepare himself for hypothetical sexual contact with a girl. The humor is light and airy and rarely comes off as anything other than confessional dirty talk. “In my imagination,” he writes, “I was King Fuck, who charmed legions of women in the field and town squares before bedding many of them in my silk-festooned chambers.” Once he went as far as he could go with imaginary sexual encounters, in high school, Bayme finally obtained the girl of his dreams. He dropped her, however, when she couldn’t compete with his fantasies. After the first few chapters, the narrative begins to sound like every other boring recollection of growing up and experimenting with forbidden things like drugs and girlie magazines. The Jewish angle gives it some niche potential, but this is routine stuff.
Fails to add anything transcendent to the canon of sexual-coming-of-age memoirs.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-06722-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: April 28, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
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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