Like Froot Loops for dinner: fun but unsubstantial.
An immature woman takes a crack at maturity in this chatty memoir.
Lancaster (My Fair Lazy: One Reality Television Addict's Attempt to Discover If Not Being A Dumb Ass Is the New Black, or, a Culture-Up Manifesto, 2010, etc.) provides some laugh-out-loud moments: Her accounts of giving herself a moustache wax in the middle of the night and of putting Vaseline all over her cat showcase the author’s cheerful willingness to share potentially embarrassing yet hilarious moments from her life. Most of the stories are about rites of adulthood, such as refinancing a mortgage and getting a mammogram, and Lancaster concludes each with a short “Reluctant Adult Lesson Learned.” This theme organizes what could have otherwise been a scattered series of anecdotes. On the whole, however, her experiences are more ordinary than transformative. Lancaster is the author of several other similar memoirs (Bitter is the New Black, Such a Pretty Fat) and often assumes that readers will be familiar with her back story, which could make it difficult for those new to her work to follow the narrative thread. At its best, this memoir will feel as comfortable as a long conversation with an old friend. However, longtime fans may wonder if they have anything in common with their old friend anymore—particularly during the chapter in which she describes her hunt for the perfect vintage bowling trophy—and new readers may occasionally feel like they are eavesdropping on an obnoxious person braying into her cell phone. Ultimately, Lancaster is abrasive and proud of it, and her ability to be true to herself mostly redeems her less-than-flattering moments.
Like Froot Loops for dinner: fun but unsubstantial.Pub Date: May 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-451-23317-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: NAL/Berkley
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
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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