A sometimes-amusing, occasionally laugh-out-loud funny look at the life of a man who clearly isn’t down for the count quite...
Less a memoir than a collection of anecdotal tales told with humor and sass by retail-display designer Sarno.
Contrary to the book’s title, the author seems to have been fairly clear about what he wanted to do with his life from a young age. From his birth in 1936 through his childhood in Italian enclaves on Long Island, N.Y., and New Jersey, we follow his growing interest in sports and art. When he tossed aside a full scholarship to Parsons School of Design, it didn’t take him long to find a job in a department-store display department, which led to a long, satisfying career. Along the way we meet Sarno’s two wives and two children, the first of each disappearing as quickly as did Sarno’s father earlier in the book, and dozens of friends, relatives and associates who come and go with such rapidity that few stand out. Maybe Sarno missed his true calling—he clearly fancies himself a comedian—but his telling-rather-than-showing writing style fails to draw in readers. A strong editorial hand could have reined in his stream-of-consciousness style without doing any harm and would definitely have made the book easier to read. To hear Sarno tell it, nearly everything he touched turned to gold…until that last misstep on the six concrete steps that led to his downfall in more ways than one and gave him the time and inclination to turn his hand to storytelling. The author’s life—including his strong relationship with his son, his brushes with the Mob and even his incessant practical jokes—has the makings of an amusing, warm-hearted book. However, though he believes his life is instantly relatable, this is the type of book best shared with relatives and close friends.
A sometimes-amusing, occasionally laugh-out-loud funny look at the life of a man who clearly isn’t down for the count quite yet, despite his injuries.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2011
ISBN: 978-1463521110
Page Count: 276
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 27, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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