A lightweight, sometimes-funny showbiz memoir from a successful background player.
A view from the trenches of show business by a comic actor straddling the line between success and obscurity.
In the foreword, Ray Romano praises Stoller, who had an occasional guest role on Everybody Loves Raymond, as someone who “without fail…always ‘brought’ the funny” and proceeds to describe this memoir as a “hilarious, honest look at the world of the working actor.” The hilarity may be more of an inside joke; the author seems more concerned with illuminating the struggles of actors, and with settling a few grudges along the way (bad dates, unappreciative colleagues), than with delivering laughs. As he explains early on, “In the Screen Actors Guild, 90 percent of the active members are out of work at any given time and 10 percent work for less than eight weeks a year…I’m thrilled to be working in a union where only 2 percent of the members work.” So even though he has “done more than sixty sitcom guest appearances,” on hits such as Seinfeld (where he was also a writer for a season, an experience he chronicled in My Seinfeld Year, 2012) and Friends, he describes a life of uncertainty and insecurity, working with agents and coaches that he isn’t sure are doing him any good and waiting for offers that might take months, even years to materialize. He reveals which casts were friendly and which paid little attention to a week’s guest, he shares the joy of being well-fed on some (and not so well on others), and he frets over sharing a bathroom. Said one casting director after a typical audition, “That’s an interesting way to go. It’s supposed to be a typical, annoying comedian, but you read it as if you were a special-ed kid, who’s pathetic and takes night courses on how to be a comedian.” He explains to readers, “I was basically just being me.”
A lightweight, sometimes-funny showbiz memoir from a successful background player.Pub Date: May 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-62087-706-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
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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