Jong-Fast is the Joan Rivers for slackers: she delights in pushing the boundaries of libel only to retreat, all in the...
From the author of the debut novel Normal Girl (2000): shallow, neurotic, very funny essays that continue to milk the writer’s relations to famous mother Erica Jong and grandfather Howard Fast.
“I knew I was going to have to prostitute this experience,” Jong-Fast acknowledges by way of mock apology for dishing the dirt on the famous people she encounters during her years of growing up, “and pretty much everything else that’s ever happened to me.” Straightaway, she dispenses with niceties: she loves lying, is “mildly maladjusted,” greedy for publicity, “somewhat self-obsessed,” and shamelessly devoted to name-dropping, especially dropping her own family’s names if that can win her food or flattery. When she first meets the new girl and future supermodel Sophie Dahl at the tony Manhattan Day School, her opening line is “Do you know who my mom is?” Some of the sacred cows Jong-Fast relishes butchering include her grandfather Howie (a novelist jailed in the ’50s for refusing to name names before HUAC; now, in his eighties, he’s marrying his forty-year-old secretary—“The bride wore a white suit. The groom wore Depends”); the various unsavory boyfriends of her mother, the so-called Queen of Erotica; the shrinks her mother employed to help the husky Molly slim down; and family friend Joan Collins, who commits the horrific faux pas of announcing that thirteen-year-old Molly was “too fat to go on Valentino’s yacht,” thus ensuring ten more years of therapy. Jong-Fast is sarcastic but not stupid, and she wields an acid pen—the “muumuu-wearing fascist” psychiatrist to the stars who helps her lose weight is dubbed “Adolf Hitler,” and one in the succession of dubious secretaries for her mom at their home on East 94th Street is “Marie Osmond,” for her “incredible value system.”
Jong-Fast is the Joan Rivers for slackers: she delights in pushing the boundaries of libel only to retreat, all in the spirit of good clean fun. After all, what else does she have to write about?Pub Date: April 12, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-6144-X
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 2025 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.
