A funny, honest, and compassionate account of growing up with a master of comedy.
George Carlin’s daughter offers an intimate look at her life growing up with a comedy legend.
Kelly Carlin was the only child of a father who started doing stand-up “on the stoops on his block, imitating the priests, cops and shopkeepers of [his New York City] neighborhood.” By the time she was 3, the family moved from Manhattan to Hollywood, where her father began to taste the success he had always dreamed of. But notoriety had its price. Carlin and her mother, Brenda, were often alone while George was out on the road performing. Brenda began to turn to alcohol and drugs to assuage the pain of separation and—in accordance with her husband’s wishes—of being unable to seek a life and career outside the home. Tired of being a “performing monkey” who entertained without touching on what he considered to be the truths of his times, George outgrew his early image as a clean-cut performer. By the early 1970s, he was routinely dropping acid, ingesting “ridiculous amounts of cocaine” and openly challenging the establishment with fiercely provocative comedy. Meanwhile, the Carlin household descended into chaos. Brought up without a clear sense of herself, the directionless author became involved in abusive relationships, a pattern she broke only after deciding to return to college in her late 20s. From that moment on, her “poor Hollywood rich kid” story evolves into an even more compelling one about a woman who struggles to come to terms with the parents she loved but whose choices and permissiveness caused her to stumble as a young adult. Without casting blame on either parent, Carlin emerges from the troubled shadow of her family. She becomes a self-aware woman able to appreciate the contributions both made to her life and—in the case of her father, the comedic “god you could smoke a joint with”—to the world.
A funny, honest, and compassionate account of growing up with a master of comedy.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-05825-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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