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
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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