Lunch fans will enjoy her unleashed musings and the healthy rage that abound in these fierce essays.
In her latest, singer, writer, and performer Lunch (The Need to Feed: Recipes for Developing a Healthy Obsession With Deeply Satisfying Foods, 2012, etc.) offers her unique blend of raw humor and uncompromising observations.
Buoyed by indignant anger and outrage, these cultural critiques function best when viewed as performance pieces that vary between scathing indictments and rambling rants. Maintaining a deliberate defiance in tone and style, the author covers broad topics, from wildly intimate experiences to coarse opinions and razor-sharp social insights. As usual, Lunch holds nothing back, providing rebellious, raunchy personal stories, scorching perspectives on the notion of mandatory motherhood, a purging glimpse at the nightmare of insomnia, and other themes. Amid these punchy personal revelations, the author layers honed essays with a broader scope. The topics include a reflective interview with Hubert Selby Jr., an in-depth profile of poet Herbert Huncke (“short shift hustler, petty thief, con artist, convicted felon, parasitic hustler, lifelong junkie…whose collected memoirs, beautifully rendered, are infused with heartbreaking detours, detailing life lived to the extreme”), a gritty history of No Wave in New York, and a blistering criticism of recent environmental degradation, pollution, and political abuses of power for economic gains. In the ambitious “Slobathon,” Lunch tackles fashion trends and the commodification of style from James Dean to the death of glam and beyond. Pulling attention to corporate greed and consumer accountability, this explosive essay seethes with the kind of urgency that reflects Lunch at her strongest. Together, these reactions to consumerism, global economic exploitation, hypocrisy, militarism, environmental destruction, and other social failures of modern American society are fervent, bordering on virulent. Consistent with her other work, the author’s voice may be faulted as uneven but never tamed; it’s not a book for the easily offended or faint of heart.
Lunch fans will enjoy her unleashed musings and the healthy rage that abound in these fierce essays.Pub Date: July 9, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-60980-943-0
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Seven Stories
Review Posted Online: May 7, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
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
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