Will try the patience of even the comedian’s fans.
Now that pretty much every one of his contemporaries has written a memoir, why not Macdonald?
The book starts out promising enough, justifying the title with the typical disclaimer: “there’s no way of telling a true story. I mean a really true one, because of memory. It’s just no good.” The author also promises to “name names,” “drop bombshells,” and “let the filth fly, like a mad dog.” Though he delivers on the first two, Macdonald’s creative imagination has reached such delirium by that point that readers are likely to discount even the parts that may be true. Most of this account takes place in Las Vegas, where the author may or may not have gambled $1 million on credit, high on morphine and whiskey, promising (and failing) to kill himself if he lost, and then borrowing another million to try to win back what he had lost—and becoming God’s anointed messenger in the process. Part of the problem here is that, as he acknowledges, “if I am remembered, it will always be by the four years I spent on Saturday Night Live and, maybe even more than that, by the events surrounding my departure from that show. As long as SNL exists, so do I.” Of his departure, he says he refused to resume telling O.J. Simpson jokes. As for the rest, he may or may not have been deeply in lust with Sarah Silverman. It isn’t likely that he engaged a hit man to murder her boyfriend, that he was sentenced to 40 years (or four months) for this, and that she took out a restraining order that made it difficult for them to do sketches together. It also isn’t likely that he was hired for the program by Lorne Michaels because of a shared passion for liquid morphine, and it isn’t likely that he received a $1 million advance for this book, whatever it is.
Will try the patience of even the comedian’s fans.Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9362-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 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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