A surprisingly warm and consistently outspoken retrospective for both fans and celebrity followers.
The self-described “king of all media” shares personal introspection and favorite celebrity interviews in his first book in two decades.
Stern (Miss America, 1995, etc.) is in top form in this entertaining amalgam of intimate confessional and Q-and-A archive. Opting for an older, wiser perspective this time around, the author strips away the juvenile raunch and sophomoric humor that made his first books runaway bestsellers. The book’s introduction, a meaty, contemplative 19-page affair, finds Stern, 65, candidly discussing his struggles with OCD, random regrets (namely his treatment of Robin Williams and Rosie O’Donnell), greatest moments (interviews with Conan O’Brien and Paul McCartney, animal rescue efforts), his move to SiriusXM in 2006, and the day he inexplicably took a rare show-day off to attend to an undisclosed cancer scare. It’s a kinder, gentler, all-grown-up side of the shock jock, which he credits to aggressive psychotherapy and his second wife, Beth. However, it’s the intimate, provocative celebrity interviews that make up the bulk of this weighty tome and which the author admits “represent my best work and show my personal evolution.” With his advancing age came wisdom, humility, empathy, and a dramatic sea change in the show’s direction and focus, as evidenced in more nuanced, probing interviews with Courtney Love, Joan Rivers, Michael J. Fox, Chris Cornell, and Lady Gaga, among others. Stern introduces each conversation with his personal perspective on the individual and the impression they made. His honest conversations with actors, music legends, and others represent an eclectic cross-section of celebrities, and his questions range from the piercing to the downright ridiculous. Perhaps the book’s most startling interview segments are those with a pre-presidential Donald Trump, whom Stern has interviewed dozens of times. Throughout the book, which is divided into thematic sections (“Sex & Relationships,” “Money & Fame,” “Drugs & Sobriety,” “Gone Too Soon,” etc.), the author’s personal growth and enduring legacy as a broadcast pioneer and unique profiler are on full display.
A surprisingly warm and consistently outspoken retrospective for both fans and celebrity followers.Pub Date: May 14, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-9429-0
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2019
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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