Dunham shows flashes of the humor and sharp eye that make Girls so compelling, but the pleasure of watching the TV show...
Girls creator Dunham reveals all—about losing her virginity, finding a therapist, shooting a series of Web videos about 20-somethings living aimless lives and more.
The book’s jacket recalls the 1970s, when Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown was coaching “mouseburgers” on “having it all.” Dunham opens by saying she’d like to do the same thing for today’s young women that Brown did for her when she picked up Having It All at a thrift store when she was in college: Let them know “a powerful, confident, and yes, even sexy woman could be made, not born.” Dunham then spends the first two sections of the book, “Love & Sex” and “Body,” writing mostly about embarrassing sex, bad breakups and traumatic trips to the gynecologist (“Last summer my vagina started to sting”) while forestalling criticism by saying that her “true friends,” those she imagined when she was an unhappy college student, would “never, ever say ‘too much information’ when you mention a sex dream you had about your father.” The problem isn’t that the author gives us too much information; the problem is that it’s repetitive and often boring, lacking the humor and stylishness of Nora Ephron or Tina Fey. Things pick up in the third section, “Friendship,” but it’s a bit surprising to read this on Page 129: “I know that when I am dying, looking back, it will be women…I sought to impress, to understand, was tortured by.” So why take so long to get to them? The fourth section, “Work,” provides some interesting background on Dunham’s life leading up to Girls, but the last section, “Big Picture,” feels like odds and ends that didn’t fit elsewhere, including essays on therapy, summer camp and hypochondria.
Dunham shows flashes of the humor and sharp eye that make Girls so compelling, but the pleasure of watching the TV show doesn’t translate to the page.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9499-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 9, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2014
SEEN & HEARD
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.
