Sullivan isn’t able to fully penetrate Carlin’s inner life, resulting in a fairly standard showbiz praise narrative. Still,...
Straightforward biography of George Carlin (1937–2008), who survived countercultural excess to become a seminal American stand-up comedian.
Boston Globe contributor Sullivan (The Hardest Working Man: How James Brown Saved the Soul of America, 2008, etc.) portrays Carlin as a singular cultural figure, connecting the 1950s’ “Silent Generation” to ’60s hippies, ’70s stoners and ’90s slackers, through a unique combination of shrewdness and provocation. “George Carlin was a natural born transgressor,” he writes. The author meticulously chronicles Carlin’s career, which intersected with many formative cultural trends of the ’50s and ’60s. He began as a regional radio DJ, moved into mainstream comedy while observing the “sick” club scene epitomized by Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce, toured extensively and became an early favorite on television, particularly late-night shows. Sullivan ably captures a sense of the entertainment industry at the time—glamorously competitive and fiercely insular. After years honing his comic chops and caricatures like the “Hippie-Dippy Weatherman,” Carlin aligned himself with the “freaks” at the right moment, becoming a hugely popular campus comedian and releasing Grammy-winning LPs. This culminated in his notorious 1972 Milwaukee arrest that eventually landed him before the Supreme Court on charges of obscenity. Sullivan argues that the incident has informed our (often incoherent) national conversation about free speech and obscenity ever since. The author also dutifully covers Carlin’s personal life. Not surprisingly, he used drugs for a time, but by his own account weaned himself off them by the ’90s. Alcohol, however, proved a harder addiction. Less well-known is his frequent personal generosity toward other comedians and his steady romance with Brenda, his wife of 36 years, who died after a brutal bout with liver cancer.
Sullivan isn’t able to fully penetrate Carlin’s inner life, resulting in a fairly standard showbiz praise narrative. Still, this is an apt, detailed memorial to a groundbreaking performer.Pub Date: June 8, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-306-81829-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: Dec. 27, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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