Essential for Python fans, who for once will not know all the punch lines.
Well-liked comic and world traveler Palin (Himalaya, 2005, etc.) turns in affable notes toward a memoir of a whirlwind decade.
Equating keeping a diary to giving up smoking—painful and no fun at first, then patently the right thing to do—Palin chronicles a time when he and his fellow Monty Pythons were setting to work making comedy history. The beginnings of the BBC series that no one quite knew what to call (The Toad Elevating Moment? Owl-Stretching Time?) were, he allows, “very bizarre,” with sketches devoted to “the death of Genghis Khan, and two men carrying a donkey past a Butlins redcoat, who later gets hit on the head with a raw chicken by a man from the previous sketch, who borrowed the chicken from a man in a suit of armor.” There are epoch-making moments: we may never know whether the pet shop of November 12, 1970, was the epicenter of the dead parrot sketch, but we now can be sure that March 29, 1971, a Monday, marks the birth of the “Grimsby Fish-Slapping dance—which ends up with my being knocked about eight feet into the cold, green, insalubrious waters of the Thames.” Python completists will be fascinated to learn that relations between the troupe members were occasionally strained, as were personal budgets; Palin reveals that they often took on ad-writing jobs for Guinness beer and such to have a few extra pence to spend. Less madcap than some of his fellows, comfortably married with children and on the quiet and bookish side to begin with, Palin still gets into misadventures and scrapes, among them with the censors who objected to the line “We make castanets of your testicles” from Holy Grail. Nonetheless, he is mostly gentle toward his foils, some of whom, such as an Indian-food-scarfing, Lumberjack-Song-quoting George Harrison, emerge as even more lovely than before.
Essential for Python fans, who for once will not know all the punch lines.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-312-36935-4
Page Count: 672
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2007
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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