A familiar, relatable story of dependence and repentance, filtered through the glam of Hollywood.
The star-filled career of one of America’s most famous entertainment show anchors, complicated by true confessions of a spectacular fall from grace.
When Charlie Sheen tells you, “That was an excellent effort, my man,” it’s probably time to take stock of your life. That’s where O’Brien (Talkin' Sports: A B.S.-er's Guide, 2008, etc.) found himself in 2005 when a series of sexually graphic, drug-and-alcohol–fueled voice-mail messages appeared in the tabloid press. Recorded during an epic drunken blackout, the messages were just one red flag for a man racing toward destruction. “Mine is a story of daydreams and fulfilled and unfulfilled ambitions,” he writes in the introduction, “of the craving for love from strangers and for belonging at the table, of failure and of redemption.” From there, the author tells a rich and well-written—if not overly complex—history of his rise from modest roots in South Dakota to becoming one of the most well-known media commentators in the country. In addition to being quite entertaining, there’s something for everyone in O’Brien’s story. Sports fans will thrill to anecdotes about legends like Muhammad Ali, Michael Jordan and Magic Johnson, told with obvious nostalgia for the 1980s and ’90s, when the author covered the Olympics, NBA Finals, Final Four and Super Bowl, among other sporting events. Consumers of tabloids will enjoy the juicy tales from a host who readily admits he’s a name-dropper. “And it goes both ways; there’s a reason people want to talk with us,” he writes. “We are the link to the fans. So, it’s not me, folks, it’s the profession. If I didn’t get to know people, I wouldn’t be around long.” In the final third of the book, O’Brien covers his dramatic descent into a brutal, life-threatening alcoholism that took two stints in rehab to survive, complete with notes from his doctors that read, “Surrender or else.”
A familiar, relatable story of dependence and repentance, filtered through the glam of Hollywood.Pub Date: Aug. 19, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-312-56437-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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
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