Unsentimental and intermittently engaging, but you’ve probably heard it all before.
Balbirer’s debut recalls her scrappy formative years as a serious thespian scraping by on the margins of America’s empty, celebrity-worshipping culture.
In the early 1980s, she was an NYU student, one of hotheaded playwright David Mamet’s prize pupils. (“Take your shirt off and cry” is derived from a Mamet witticism about what’s expected of the average Hollywood actress.) After winning her expletive-dispensing instructor’s approbation, she dallied with off-Broadway bohemianism and then sprinted off to bigger things—i.e., demeaning money jobs. Her years as a full-time actress were marked by tiny victories and, more often, nagging failures, both professional and romantic. In New York, the once high-minded Balbirer soon found herself groveling before TV-biz hustlers whose biggest concern was that her breasts might be too small. She ended up playing a succession of floozies on MTV’s Remote Control, and her Debra Winger impersonations landed her a grueling set of dead-end auditions with Saturday Night Live producer Lorne Michaels. In Los Angeles, she nabbed a bit part on Seinfeld, and her career began to show signs of actual progress. But low self-esteem, sexist boyfriends and lame-duck agents seemed to lead nowhere except to obsessive bra stuffing and debilitating diets. Some of Balbirer’s late-career lowlights included being rejected for a role by Luke Perry and being mysteriously fired from an unnamed popular sitcom by her “friend” Jane (no last name, though we’re assured she’s now an established Hollywood commodity). Later chapters show the author engaging in some tough-minded self-assessment and finally hitting upon a way to transcend her ill-fated acting career—become a writer. Balbirer’s angst-filled prose is sometimes feisty and observant enough to mask the fact that this is basically a depthless memoir of obsessive success-chasing and the agony of defeat, Hollywood-style.
Unsentimental and intermittently engaging, but you’ve probably heard it all before.Pub Date: April 20, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-59691-478-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2009
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
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
© Copyright 2026 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.
