Barber’s "automatic bullshit detector" has served her well and makes for a winning book.
The veteran celebrity journalist looks back on her legendary ability for asking questions others wouldn't dare.
Barber (An Education, 2010, etc.) believes being "exceptionally nosy" is part of what has made her so successful as a journalist. "I want to understand other people,” she writes, “I want to know what they think, what they do when I'm not there, how they interact, especially with their families, and how they got to be how they are." The author’s astringent manner and desire to cut through the typical PR fluff and draw her subjects out have made her many celebrity profiles—as well as her memoir—worth reading. Barber is equally frank discussing her working-class upbringing (that and her bookish nature made her stand apart from her well-heeled schoolmates) and seven-year apprenticeship at Penthouse magazine, after which she moved on to Vanity Fair, Observer, Sunday Times and others. Rather than common folk, she has interviewed celebrities and artists whom she admires "for their talent, but even more for the courage it takes to become a star, to leave the cosy camaraderie of the herd." The author complains that actors are the most difficult to interview and that athletes "never seem to have anything interesting to say.” For example, she regards her 2011 interview with tennis champion Rafael Nadal (reprinted here, along with several others)—during which his handler told him what to say—as making “a silk purse out of a sow's ear." Footnotes are definitely in order, as Barber's British references will puzzle American readers who won't have a clue what "I don't want to sound pi about it" means or think making coffee in a "Smeg-filled kitchen" sounds unsanitary.
Barber’s "automatic bullshit detector" has served her well and makes for a winning book.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4088-3719-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2014
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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