A small-town-kid-in-a-big-city memoir that mostly shines with borrowed star power but glows every now and then with its own...
An Emmy Award–winning CNN producer shares an occasionally humorous peek into his star-studded, behind-the-scenes life in broadcasting.
“If a bird can adapt and succeed in the big, complicated city,” writes Anderson Cooper 360 producer Gray after observing a pigeon cross a busy street, “I can, too.” The author chronicles his career from its early beginnings in small-town New Hampshire, where, armed with a camcorder, he recruited his 8-year-old sister and great-grandmother for his own nightly news show. Since then, Gray has booked the likes of powerhouse notables Condoleezza Rice, John Kerry and Mitt Romney, and he's witnessed the “glorious chaos” of the political arena. He's also become best buds with Kathy Griffin and Soleil Moon Frye. As with all good works of celebrity gossip, Kim Kardashian makes a brief appearance in these essays. Although the relentless scatological humor and cheap shots at celebrities who've made it on his hit list are no doubt intended to be funny, the comedy is often lost in Gray's cynical, heavy-handed snark. Gray is at his best when he steers clear of secondhand glamour, instead focusing on his family or shining a spotlight on the shortcomings of the contemporary news-media industry. The author writes eloquently and insightfully of the rapidly changing cable-news scene and its “real-time insanity,” while simple stories of his dog, grandparents and coming out to his family are honest and tender. Play-by-play accounts of buying donuts with Griffin in the middle of the night, however, have more in common with the kind of Twitter drivel Gray lambastes.
A small-town-kid-in-a-big-city memoir that mostly shines with borrowed star power but glows every now and then with its own candor and heart.Pub Date: Feb. 19, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4516-4134-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Nov. 6, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
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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