Sensitive, discerning, and deeply affectionate without ever slopping over into hagiography.
A wild and fascinating ride with actor Griggs as he chauffeurs improvisational guru Del Close around Chicago during the last two years of Close’s life.
In exchange for free lessons at the ImprovOlympic Training Center, the author was drafted to take artistic director Close on his weekly errands. Griggs was a solid wiseacre, so the Center figured he was up to tangling with an intimidating man who could easily turn actors to onstage jelly with his fiery critiques. But Close was far from a regal figure; he had more weaknesses, quirks, and blemishes than his most talented pupils, who included nearly the entire early Saturday Night Live group. Griggs’s timed and textured prose is anything but improvisational, and each of the short chapters here is a success. They range from grim to hilarious; some are heavy with technique, some simply chronicle a day in the life. Even the chapter that unpromisingly begins, “A new Ikea store had opened, and Del wanted to see it,” turns out to be a doozy. By the time Griggs met Close, the improv legend was plagued by emphysema, and a lifetime of substance abuse had aged him well beyond his 63 years. (The author doesn’t linger over Close’s past, but it gets sufficient airtime.) Yet his mind sparkled, especially when he was expounding on improvisational theater. “Wear your character like a thin veil,” he told Griggs. “Treat your scene partners like artists and poets.” For Close, the best laughter came as a release of energy when “two previously incompatible or dissimilar ideas suddenly form into a new piece of understanding.” Playing the Lord of Misrule in public, he drummed on Griggs like a vibraphone; describing the author as “my little retarded friend” to a bemused Golden Nugget waitress was just the beginning. The errands provided Close with an excuse to travel down Memory Lane, through improvisational theory and into a crackling friendship with his driver.
Sensitive, discerning, and deeply affectionate without ever slopping over into hagiography.Pub Date: April 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-56663-614-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ivan Dee/Rowman & Littlefield
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2005
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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