As might be expected from her Twitter account, Oxford has a gift for snarky one-liners and self-effacing humor, but her...
The latest book of comic personal essays by Twitter sensation Oxford (Everything Is Perfect When You’re a Liar, 2013) consists of verbal snapshots of embarrassing scenes from her childhood and later life.
The author, who grew up in western Canada and now lives in Los Angeles, made a name for herself with her tweets, most recently when she elicited millions of responses after inviting readers to respond with stories of sexual abuse attached to the hashtag #NotOkay. She writes seriously and with pride about these responses in the final essay in the volume. The other essays, arranged in no discernible order, relate occasionally amusing stories from Oxford’s anxiety-ridden life. In one, she begs her parents to allow her to go to summer camp and finds that it doesn’t live up to her fantasies. In another, she attends day camp (“middle-class, working parent prison”) and is alarmed to find herself on the edge of a tornado and in danger of being pelted by baseball-sized hail. This anecdote segues abruptly into an account of her fears that her children will be endangered by earthquakes in Southern California. The essays about the author’s adulthood are generally less fully developed than the childhood ones. In one odd one, she sends her husband off on a date with a guy he believes has been flirting with him at the gym and then interrupts them when she senses something serious is happening. Several of the essays retrace familiar territory, like one in which she looks forward to spending a couple weeks working while her husband and kids are in Canada and instead wastes her time stuffing her face with chips and watching TV.
As might be expected from her Twitter account, Oxford has a gift for snarky one-liners and self-effacing humor, but her stories are weakly structured and often drift to their ends without resolution.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-232277-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017
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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
