In his debut, Hamlin—best known for his role as Perseus in the 1981 film Clash of the Titans, as well as his stint on L.A....
A comic memoir recounting the obstacles one man endured on his quest to become an actor.
In his debut, Hamlin—best known for his role as Perseus in the 1981 film Clash of the Titans, as well as his stint on L.A. Law—depicts how his lifetime of debacles began at an early age. At four he urinated in the dog dish, and a few years later, wrote a book report on Mein Kampf, resulting in his removal from school. On Christmas Day 1962, his parents offered him less offensive reading material—a five-year subscription to Playboy—though this would have an equally disastrous result for the hormone-crazed youth. From Hamlin's first introduction to the female body, the memoir takes a turn, no longer focusing on the innocent trials of a prepubescent boy but rather on the litany of sexual escapades that followed the actor throughout his life. While the author’s tales of sexual encounters string the narrative together, his romps are not the focal point. Instead, Hamlin's history with drugs overpowers the other aspects of the story. Though he explains his run-ins with law enforcement in a comical manner, readers will recognize the seriousness of his crimes. The book is rampant with road trips, fraternity debacles and prison sentences, yet when these unoriginal tales are told with hackneyed phrases (“Bring it on, baby!”; “But that's another story”), readers may desire more substance. Nevertheless, Hamlin's story has its charms, and his unabashed honesty provides a clear view of a boy's life in the late-’60s and early-’70s. In one instance, he describes selling himself as a handyman in order to raise money for a road trip to Woodstock. “I highly recommend this strategy of creating an income when you're seventeen and know how to do absolutely nothing but sleep and whack off,” he writes, acknowledging his own low expectations for himself in a world that would one day require much from him.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4391-6999-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2010
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
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
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