Intrepid and often irreverent, Kaling humbly probes her own triumphs and defeats with laugh-out-loud results.
Light yet insightful personal essays from one of Hollywood’s cleverest writers.
Kaling (Is Everyone Hanging Out with Me?, 2011) dishes up another collection of humorous first-person essays on topics ranging from exposés borne of her insider’s view on TV stardom—“Sex scenes are the tits”—to an inspirational speech she gave at Harvard Law School. Photographs interspersed throughout the book help underscore the author’s kindly self-deprecating sense of humor and demonstrate her points about the stages of her typical 17-hour workday (“A Day in the Life of Mindy Kaling”) or the value of having a flotilla of stylists prepare you for a photo shoot (“How to Look Spectacular: A Starlet’s Confessions”). Fans of The Office and The Mindy Project will relish Kaling’s snapshots from the writers’ room and no-holds-barred depiction of the breakneck pace at which this writer/show-running actor lives while at work on her series. Readers less familiar with Kaling’s TV exploits will also find interesting food for thought in more extended pieces examining friendship and varying levels of intimacy. Though the collection might easily be relegated to the shelves of chick-lit memoir for its bald appeal to young women or “a gay man getting a present for your even gayer friend,” Kaling’s reflections on her own self-image reveal an admirable depth of introspection. Particularly motivational is the volume’s closing piece, in which the author calls out undeserved confidence: “Confidence is just entitlement...simply the belief that you deserve something. Which is great. The hard part is, you’d better make sure you deserve it.” Having had to continually face the gauntlet of questions of what it’s like enduring her Hollywood “otherness” due to her Indian origin, curvaceous figure, and willingness to speak the truth, Kaling espouses her hard-won mantra: “If you’ve got it, flaunt it. And if you don’t got it? Flaunt it. ’Cause what are we even doing here if we’re not flaunting it?”
Intrepid and often irreverent, Kaling humbly probes her own triumphs and defeats with laugh-out-loud results.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8041-3814-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Crown Archetype
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2015
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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