A quirkily intelligent memoir of finding oneself in movies.
A Brooklyn-based writer and editor’s memoir about how watching John Hughes films as an adolescent gave meaning to his troubled life.
Rolling Stone sports editor Diamond grew up a member of the Jewish minority in suburban Chicago. For the first few years of his life, his mother and his candy manufacturer father lived an American dream that included “two cars [and]…a house…built with the money made from rotting the teeth of children who could only afford to spend a quarter on snacks.” His life changed dramatically after his parents divorced. By the time he was 7, he had attended four different schools and become “the weird kid [whom] nobody knew.” It was then that a babysitter introduced him to Hughes’ Pretty in Pink, which immediately became his favorite film for the comfort it gave him that even kids who were different could “still be cool.” As Diamond grew older and began watching more of Hughes’ movies, he found that they helped him to make sense of things like the social divisions in high school, where “everyone had his or her place, just like in a Hughes movie.” But then his mother, who could not cope with their rocky, adversarial relationship, moved away and left her son to fend for himself. Clinically depressed, homeless, and often drunk or high, Diamond turned even more to Hughes’ feel-good films to help him make sense of an unforgiving world. He then moved to New York, where he decided that he would write the director’s biography. After spending most of his 20s bouncing between Chicago and New York, often unhappy and endlessly revising a book he would never publish, his life finally came together. Both funny and heartbreaking, Diamond’s memoir is not just an account of how one director’s films impacted—and perhaps saved—his life. It is also a memorable reflection on what it means to let go of the past and grow up.
A quirkily intelligent memoir of finding oneself in movies.Pub Date: Nov. 29, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-242483-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 5, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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