A stunt more than a literary achievement; not without merit but requiring more effort than most readers are likely to want...
Mix David Foster Wallace with Patti Smith, Augusten Burroughs, and Karen Finley, throw in powders and pills, stuff it in a deep-dish pizza box, and you’re in the territory of compulsive blogger Boyle’s post-postmodern blockbuster.
“Feel like I’m about to vomit and I’m being watched and my execution is soon.” So writes sometime Vice columnist Boyle toward the end of this long, loping hyperextension of the “quantified self” or life-logging movement, by which every thought, every detail, every meal, every bed-wetting, every kiss, every bowel movement, every drink, every drug over the year 2013 gets recorded, “everything i do, think, feel, and say, to the best of my ability.” Oh, are there drugs and drinks, and oh are there all those other things, most of them definitively in the realm of the First-World problem. Xanax, Adderall, heroin, energy drinks, phenethylamine, doughnuts, pizza, zinfandel, kale, cocaine, and kombucha: Enough of that, and some weirdly surreal moments are wont to happen, as when Boyle, as if discovering language, writes, “ ‘bumpy fish’ is a code name for bumpy fish. and maybe that’s all you need to know.” Maybe. Probably. It stands to reason that living in Brooklyn while entertaining such a diet, staying up all night and sleeping all day, and spending your life on the keyboard might impede one’s financial progress, and so it is: “dad agreed to give me money for groceries and things,” she writes. “seems shitty of me. i’m 27 years old. i’m sick.“ Dad is always there to help, it seems, and so is Mom, while others in the chronicler’s life are less helpful, from the landlord demanding rent to “everyone who doesn’t floss regularly.” Still, Boyle’s log/blog, billed as a novel, is full of zeitgeist-y stuff that will puzzle future historians, punctuated by moments of millennial aspiration, self-direction, and exhortation, from “Do not fuck with me” to “hang up clothes/laundry.”
A stunt more than a literary achievement; not without merit but requiring more effort than most readers are likely to want to give.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9992186-2-4
Page Count: 712
Publisher: Tyrant Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
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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