“Humor writers are funny people who are constantly in the process of convincing the world that they are indispensably...
Katz fits snugly into his self-described role as an “emotionally needy joke writer” for the Clinton administration, though readers get all 40 of his years in this memoir.
Clinton was in the market for what Katz had to sell: self-deprecating humor, the idea being that if you step in it, it's better to join in the merriment than to be laughed at. Of course, the president gave his gagman lots of good raw material. But Katz’s favorite topic is himself, so he starts at the beginning, with his years as the grade-school clown, and gets off some good lines when he moves on to college (“Once an East Coast epicenter of 1960s social activism . . . the Cornell I attended was a petri dish for Yuppie scum”) and post-grad studies (“Law school was the Vietnam of my generation, a quagmire where promising young lives were needlessly wasted or damaged forever”). Biding his time as Daniel Moynihan's gofer, Katz gets a crack of writing humor material for Michael Dukakis—can't say he doesn't like a challenge—and here he tenders some of his better stuff, from “Hi, I'm Mike Dukakis. And these are my eyebrows” on the low side to “Some people say I am arrogant, but I know better” on the high. Katz is looking for a job soon enough, but school chum George Stephanopoulos rescues him from ad copywriting. What follows mostly explains (in considerable detail) how he arrived at the jokes Clinton slung at the Gridiron Dinner or the Correspondents’ Dinner. For good measures, Katz throws in scenes of jousting with nemesis Al Franken and bares his self-doubts: “Writing these semantic jokes that were narrowly construed to fortify falsehoods, had I finally turned into a goddamn lawyer?” All of which begs the question: Who was paying this guy's salary?
“Humor writers are funny people who are constantly in the process of convincing the world that they are indispensably funny.” In a nutshell. (b&w illustrations, not seen)Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7868-6949-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2003
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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