A satisfying if sometimes-dark read for Palin’s many fans. Those interested in the inner workings of showbiz will find much...
Now is the ’90s of our discontent….
It’s not exactly a decennium horribilis that Monty Python member and world traveler Palin (The Truth, 2013, etc.) describes in this journal. As the author notes at the start of this third volume, he closed the late 1980s with the sense that he’d been frittering away his life, someone “who had reached his mid-forties with no great adventures to show for it.” Be careful what you wish for, for Palin immediately found himself swept up in what would become a quarter-century–long series of televised adventures, beginning with sturdy vehicles such as Around the World in Eighty Days and Pole to Pole and spinning off in all sorts of directions. In between, though, were the standard press junkets: show up for a screening, a book signing, a gallery opening, “pontificate on the Python years and become pretentious.” Palin reveals himself to be a serious, sympathetic fellow most of the time, if sometimes given to self-doubt and moping. At turns, he is speaking in hushed tones with Fergie, the Duchess of York, and finding her more congenial and substantial than he might have thought (“She paints a depressing, almost frightening, picture of the royal life”); worrying at world events such as a renewed IRA bombing campaign in London (“they kill out of an intensity, a fierceness, a dogged, deep unshakeable belief, as people have done throughout history”); and trying to pull together sometimes-warring factions into a reunion (“the unsatisfactory Python stage show business pushes itself, once again, into the front of my mind”). The decade’s worth of notes ends on a rather dour note, befitting a gloomy English new year that, of course, he could escape by hopping on a jet to some more tropical clime.
A satisfying if sometimes-dark read for Palin’s many fans. Those interested in the inner workings of showbiz will find much of value, too.Pub Date: Nov. 24, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-07707-3
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Aug. 8, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
