The literary equivalent of a wet–T-shirt contest, despite the bittersweet ending.
A former Virgin Airlines flight attendant’s steamy recollections of international binge drinking, obsessive shopping, and a host of affairs.
The latest in a long line of flight attendant literature beginning with the irreverent Coffee, Tea, or Me?: The Uninhibited Memoirs of Two Airline Stewardesses (1967), Smith’s debut memoir (co-written with Stow) recalls her time shagging and shopping her way around the world as a young sky waitress. This one features a level of sophistication relative to Geordie Shore and Sex in the City. When not relating high-altitude tales of annoying passengers, randy pilots, silly stewardess high jinks, or near-emergency inflight incidents, Smith regales readers with soft-core sexual details of the many physically dynamic but intellectually dim hunks she bedded over the years. At first, the author’s sexual escapades were mostly limited to long-term relationships with men in the flight industry; her ultimate goal seemed to be joining the “mile high club” via sex in an airplane at 5,000 feet (Smith’s induction ceremony took place precariously in a tiny Cessna). Yet much of the book also consists of Smith and her stewardess sisterhood either going gaga over muscle-bound millionaires or being picked up by all manner of desperate creeps while quaffing cocktails and partying nonstop in bars and hotels from New York to Johannesburg. Although Smith’s portrait of herself throughout is (presumably unintentionally) as a figure of fun and easy ridicule, there comes a point in her marriage-minded mid-30s that she actually ends up a figure of pathos. After being cruelly used by a succession of millionaire jerks, readers may feel some respect for her when she finally lowers her ridiculous standards and marries a guy who sells gym memberships.
The literary equivalent of a wet–T-shirt contest, despite the bittersweet ending.Pub Date: June 30, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-14-751598-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Plume
Review Posted Online: March 31, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 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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