Not likely to appeal to everyone, but irascibly charming in its honesty.
A bleak memoir, played for laughs, of growing up poor, Jewish and drugged-out in Oakland, Calif.
Los Angeles–based comedian Kasher encountered enough unusual early trauma to justify both his profession and his acerbic outlook. Both his mother and father were deaf; as a boy, his mother abruptly broke up the family to move to California (“Oakland in the mid-eighties was a very interesting place to be white”), leaving his embittered father to retreat into an ultra-orthodox sect. Like many misfits, Kasher realized early on that class clown provided a potent identity. As an adolescent he took to drug and alcohol abuse with a vengeance, moving quickly from marijuana to LSD to dealing and wannabe gangsterism. He is frank about the appeal of drug abuse to self-loathing, marginalized teenagers: “I walked around the world convinced that I had some private information that had been kept from the rest of the squares in the world.” Kasher is equally honest about his callous treatment of his long-suffering mother and about his antagonistic trips through various rehab programs and special-needs schools. Yet his redemption arc is rather brisk; aware that any opportunity for a future was melting away, he ultimately decided at 16 to give up his atrocious habits on his own. “Why that day was any different, I don’t know,” he writes. “Something had died in me. My will had died. My childhood had died.” Throughout the narrative, Kasher relies on exaggerations, asides to the reader, general crudity and broad ethnic humor rooted in the absurdity of a Jewish adolescent narrator-observer in racially tense Oakland. However, the author provides keen observations, capturing grim yet mordantly funny details about the everyday life of lower-income people living hard lives in decayed urban environments.
Not likely to appeal to everyone, but irascibly charming in its honesty.Pub Date: March 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-446-58426-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
© 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.
