Like spending time with your least ambitious and most charming friend.
Droll account of a circuitous path to responsible adulthood.
Enabled by a monthly allowance from her parents, Klam rolled through her 20s and into her 30s in a nebulous haze of bourgeois depression and daydreams about making it as a writer. Weeks and months floated by as she spent entire days listening to her headphones while walking around Manhattan in overalls, now and then reluctantly clocking in to work in her father’s office. Occasionally, her not-very-post-adolescent torpor was interrupted by an interview for a job as, say, Barbra Streisand’s assistant, or by an affair with a parasitic ex-con whose sponginess and lack of interest in being accountable rivaled the author’s. This material could well be annoying if Klam weren’t so funny, setting her scenes with an incisive, self-deprecating slant. Her memoir isn’t driven by action, but by conversational humor and revealing, original stories. (When her therapist touted the satisfactions of self-sufficiency, she countered, “But isn’t there also a satisfaction in getting someone to take care of you?”) Another appealing highlight is the author’s engaging rapport with her mother. Despite her avowed laziness, Klam landed a writing job at VH1, where she met her future husband and was nominated for an Emmy. The weakest part of the book is devoted to her obsession with such wedding trappings as a diamond ring and a tiara, the only acceptable accessories for “a beautiful princess in a ball gown.” Subsequent pages atone by chronicling Klam’s late introduction to real life. Her husband grappled with serious diabetes and joblessness; she sold her jewelry and was forced to find her professional footing. She gave birth to a daughter and found moderate financial success as a freelance writer for women’s magazines. Today she relishes, albeit somewhat sardonically, the rewarding flipside of growing up.
Like spending time with your least ambitious and most charming friend.Pub Date: March 27, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59448-980-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2007
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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