A unique, poised, and polished first book from a respected actress.
An award-winning actress’s collection of never-sent literary missives to the men who have most influenced her personal development.
In this accomplished debut, Parker, who has won Tony, Emmy, and Golden Globe awards, traces her life story through a series of essays that she addresses to the “manly creature[s]” who have made her into the woman she is. Her first letters are to male members of her immediate family, including her grandfather and father. Both anchored her to a family heritage, and both are individuals in whom she catches glimpses of herself and her children. From there, Parker radiates outward to others, such as the “Yacqui Indian Boy” and the “Risk Taker” singing star, who gave her glimpses of worlds that existed beyond the small town she knew growing up. Like the Indian Boy and the Risk Taker, her addressees are often men who educated her in ways she never expected. A college “movement teacher” who gave Parker a negative evaluation of her work and self-presentation not only taught her the wisdom of “[l]etting someone you don’t really like surprise you,” but also an important lesson in humility. Some, like the three men she collectively refers to as Cerberus, taught her to value herself through the hard lessons in mistreatment they gave her. Others, like the nameless New York City cab driver upon whom she heaped unmerited blame and abuse, become the objects of apology and of musings on who she was at particular moments in time. Still others, like “Gorgeous” and “Oyster Picker,” are creations of the author’s fertile imagination and express, on the one hand, her longings for the perfect man and reconnection with her beloved dead father on the other. Parker's missives move effortlessly among nostalgia, intensity, and playfulness, but in the end, they all work together to reveal both the small and large ways in which we impact each other.
A unique, poised, and polished first book from a respected actress.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5011-0783-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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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