There’s nothing groundbreaking, but the actress comes across as down-to-earth, likable, and humanly fallible.
The former Glee star looks back with amusement and a feisty attitude on a career in modeling and acting.
As a child, Rivera did commercials for Mattel and OshKosh and had a role in The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air before she hit an acting dry spell in her teens and early 20s. In her debut book, the author pays as much attention to her less-glamorous years, when her family was struggling and moving frequently, as she does to the Glee ones, where she gets into at least a few of the juicy details of cast gossip—complete with drugs and plenty of bed-hopping—that fans are likely to be hoping for. She includes excerpts from the nightly “to do” lists she faithfully kept for herself in junior high and high school, in which entries like “get new eye sleeper mask,” “get some more money,” “take back miniskirt,” “take back shorts to V. Secret” alternate with heavier thoughts such as, “figure out God stuff” and “think about something other than material things.” Each of the chapters ends with a list of relevant experiences for which Rivera is sorry and an equally long one of those for which she is not: she’s sorry, for example, about “wall mounting a TV in a rental,” “hooking up with a married dude,” and “buying cars I couldn’t afford. Eff the Mercedes—I should have gotten a Honda.” She’s not sorry about “learning to memorize lines before I even learned to spell” and the “boob job” she got at 18. Rivera writes frankly about her anorexia during high school and an abortion she had while she was working on Glee, about which she still feels guilty. The volume is illustrated with pictures of Rivera from childhood to the present.
There’s nothing groundbreaking, but the actress comes across as down-to-earth, likable, and humanly fallible.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-399-18498-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: TarcherPerigee
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2016
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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