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 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
SEEN & HEARD
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