A story of societal change, rich in cultural as well as personal history.
A veteran movie critic for Entertainment Weekly debuts with a chronicle of his love affair with films, his long career at EW (before they laid him off in 2014), and his gnarly love life (until his marriage).
For much of his life, Gleiberman was fortunate. He was able to spend most of his days doing what he loved: seeing and commenting on the movies. His career received a jump-start when, in his 20s, the redoubtable New Yorker critic Pauline Kael became interested in him and helped him get his first job with the Boston Phoenix. The paper fired him, but not long afterward, EW, a new Time-Life publication, hired him. Gleiberman describes his uncomfortable life with his father—for whom wedding vows of fidelity were only a suggestion—his nerdy social isolation as a film freak, his drug and alcohol use, and his uncomfortable, cringe-inducing confessions about his years at EW as a hustler of young women around the office. He pauses often for commentary about films, directors, and performers he liked (and didn’t), is generally kind to his colleagues (not always: Amy Taubin and Peter Travers take some Gleiberman guff), and fiercely defends his dislike for some films that were extraordinarily popular, including Pretty Woman and The Fellowship of the Ring. Throughout, the author’s prose style is conversational, even colloquial. At the end, he writes affectingly of the slow disappearance of newspapers and of print film criticism (“the case for why it matters cannot be made in practical terms”) and the surge of a kind of mass homogenization of cultural opinion that he finds depressing—and irreversible. Sad, too, is his account of his slow slide at EW, beginning with the elevation of Lisa Schwarzbaum to be his featured equal and ending with the word that the magazine would be moving in a new direction.
A story of societal change, rich in cultural as well as personal history.Pub Date: Feb. 23, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-316-38296-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Hachette
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2015
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 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.
