Occasionally titillating, more often tedious.
A debut memoir recounts a childhood spent at Hugh Hefner’s knee.
Saginor’s father was a close friend of the mogul, who actually gave him his own room in the Playboy Mansion. From the time Saginor was six, she and her younger sister spent a goodly amount of time there, even though their horrified mother got a court order to prevent her ex-husband from taking them to bunny-land. To no avail: the girls reveled in the attention their dad showered upon them; they loved playing in Hef’s game room; they loved having butlers at their service. So they lied to their mother about where they were, becoming pawns in a parental chess game. In high school, Saginor finally moved out of her mom’s house and in with dad. At the mansion she learned about cocaine and cunnilingus. She had a fling with a hunky young actor, but developed a much closer sexual and emotional relationship with one of Hef’s girlfriends, a woman she calls Kendall. Occasionally, Saginor made forays back into normal life at Beverly Hills High, but as the months rolled on, she invested more and more of herself in the Playboy world. Ultimately, she went east to college, where at friends’ homes she saw normal family life for the first time. Saginor concludes with her post-college return to L.A. “with a new set of eyes.” She sometimes still dropped by the Mansion, but only on special occasions. Overall, the story she tells is quite repetitive: sex, drugs, guns, more sex, more drugs, bouncing back and forth between the Mansion and high school, more sex, another gun. In addition, Saginor’s therapeutic revelations tend to the banal. She realizes that she had been seeking a mother figure in Kendall, and she shares with us the blinding revelation that “my parents may never be who I want them to be [but their] spirit will always be with me.”
Occasionally titillating, more often tedious.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-076156-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: HarperEntertainment
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 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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