Engaging because it doesn’t take itself too seriously.
A fitfully amusing memoir that seems to be based on the (seemingly correct) premise that any comedian can land a book deal.
Mainly known as the host of The Soup, McHale is no Tina Fey. However, any prolonged exposure on TV seems to require that the personality put his name on a memoir as a means of “ ‘extending his brand’ through the written word.” Thus it is with The Soup host and co-star of the sitcom Community. “I needed a new revenue stream,” writes the author. “Sure I had conquered television—both real and cable. I had mildly defeated the world of cinema—both theatrical and straight-to-video. And I had bent the world of comedy over my knee and made it called me ‘the Harbormaster’….I was good at talking, that much was certain. But how could I turn the words I usually talked into a permanent thing that people could purchase at a wildly inflated price?” Even those who don’t care much about McHale or feel that they know enough about him will be entertained by his tales of prickly Chevy Chase, his annotated account of the various actresses he has kissed (and fondled), his tempest-in-a-teapot feuds after delivering comic jobs at Robert DeNiro and Mickey Rourke, and his memories of Robin Williams and “Chubby Matt Damon.” When hosting the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, McHale discovered that “the experience of meeting the president was like a ride at Disneyland. You wait in a long line, the most exciting part lasts a few seconds, and then you’re spit out into an empty hallway, breathless and dazed. Later, someone shows you a photo to prove that it happened.” The book’s second section is funny self-help, designed to show readers how to attain, sustain, and survive the author’s level of celebrity. It extends the amusement park simile: “the life of a celebrity is like a roller coaster—plenty of ups and downs, and with a fair share of vomit.”
Engaging because it doesn’t take itself too seriously.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-399-57537-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
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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