Never preachy, though not always engaging—an earnest story of laughs and love.
Saturday Night Live alum Breuer chronicles a life in comedy and a life with God.
“All of my life,” writes the author in his first book, “humor had been a natural default operating mode for me,” and that God had given him the gift to make people laugh so that he might help and heal. His early years read like a stock bio for a comedian: making the neighborhood kids laugh growing up on Long Island, desultory attempts at college mixed with odd jobs, all the while struggling as a stand-up comedian, performing whenever and wherever he could. He had minor success on television with the show Uptown Comedy Club (which also featured Tracy Morgan) and was hired for a sitcom with the enigmatic Dave Chappelle and promptly fired. Then came SNL. Here the book starts to come alive as the author recounts his efforts to compete with a gifted and hungry cast. Breuer provides mostly generous portraits of his fellow cast members, and notes that he didn’t become a star on the show until he came up with an imitation of Joe Pesci as a talk-show host and developed the decidedly odd character of “Goat Boy.” One night, Chris Farley, guesting on the show at the height of his fame, called Breuer, asking sadly and pitifully, “Am I funny?...Am I just the fat, dumb guy?” Farley would soon be dead, and Breuer regretted not trying harder to save him. Other successes followed SNL, including a well-known role as a stoner in the Chappelle vehicle Half Baked (1998), but Breuer felt he should do more than just be funny. Conversations with Steve Harvey and, later, Bill Cosby—encounters he took as signs from God—convinced him that his family, everyday life and faith could be the stuff of comedy. At this point he became what he calls a “family” comedian. Breuer ends with the story of taking his 87-year-old father on the road with him, and the author’s meditations on how to properly treat and care for the elderly are telling and wise.
Never preachy, though not always engaging—an earnest story of laughs and love.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-592-40575-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Gotham Books
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2010
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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