A thoughtful account of the exhilaration—and potential disenchantment—that accompanies career achievements.
A debut rags-to-riches memoir follows a man’s trek from inauspicious beginnings to success in advertising.
Holtzman was born in 1942 in Brownsville, Brooklyn, a hardscrabble neighborhood teeming with territorial gangs and organized crime. He was a clever and resourceful youth but quickly discovered he didn’t have the combination of brutality and physical toughness necessary for dominance on the streets. But while studying art education at the Pratt Institute, he decided to enter the advertising field and eventually left school—in defiance of his parents’ protests— to pursue a career at Young & Rubicam, where he would remain for years. Holtzman enjoyed a meteoric rise, eventually becoming a senior vice president, buying a weekend home in Connecticut, and purchasing a luxury car—all before he was 30 years old. He traveled the world filming commercials. Unfortunately, his personal life was considerably less satisfying. His first marriage dissolved under the weight of his wife’s serial infidelity and estrangement. The author’s next relationship, with a woman named Nora—filled with shared creative pursuits, travel to exotic destinations, and a surfeit of drug use—fizzled out after four years. When he finally turned down a promotion to be creative director of Asia, a position that would have been based in Hong Kong, his career at Young & Rubicam was torpedoed. He was forced to reconsider a life filled with professional accomplishments but sorely lacking fulfillment. Holtzman finally found another job, but, more importantly, he found a deeper sense of animating purpose in his devotion to a new wife and daughter. Holtzman writes lucidly and affectingly about the humble circumstances of his birth, recounting his father’s emasculating failure at business and his brother’s attempt at suicide. In addition, the author is impressively forthcoming about his romantic floundering, including the sad downward spiral of his first wife into mental instability. Still, the real draw of the personal rather than the professional sections of the autobiography is the depiction of Brownsville, a staging ground for urban blight and racial rivalry. Holtzman’s remembrance often provides too much microscopic detail, especially about his travels—it wasn’t necessary to describe all four of his trips to Jamaica—and the intramural conflicts at his firm. Nevertheless, he poignantly captures the existential crisis he encountered, one that couldn’t be overcome through more work or artistic diversions: “Actually, I had gone into advertising for the purpose of survival, to pull me out of the dead end that was Brownsville. Advertising had given me the money and exposure to accomplish that. I had sold my soul for a get-out-of-jail card. Now that I was out of jail, what was I going to do?” One wishes the author lingered on this subject a bit longer—the recollection ends with his deliverance from spiritual languor, more asserted than explained. Since this is the culmination of his life’s escape from Brownsville, one additional chapter on how family provided direction or consolation or both seems in order.
A thoughtful account of the exhilaration—and potential disenchantment—that accompanies career achievements.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-979767-76-7
Page Count: 278
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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