An invigorating breath of fresh air.
The Emmy-winning star of Everybody Loves Raymond pens an engaging, effervescent story of her life.
Heaton’s humor occasionally lapses into strained wisecracking, and she repeats some details, but these are minor flaws in that rare thing—an upbeat memoir that doesn’t obsess about the rough times but instead is beguilingly sensible and wise about what’s important: the author’s family, faith, and craft. “I suffer from an early childhood malady that’s more common than you’ve been led to believe,” she begins. “I call it Way Too Normal and Happy Upbringing Syndrome.” Born and raised in a suburban Cleveland house filled with laughter, she belonged, like many of her neighbors, to a large, Catholic family. The local children played together, building snow forts in winter and picking berries along the rail track in summer, knowing that they could stay outside unsupervised until the streetlights came on. Her father was a sportswriter for The Cleveland Plain-Dealer; her mother, a homemaker who read widely, especially theology, died from an aneurysm when Heaton was 12. But the family held together, and Heaton now realizes that “bad breaks are not the worst things that can happen to you.” As she details her bumpy road to stardom—in New York she waited tables, proofread on the graveyard shift at Morgan Stanley, and washed her hair with shampoo samples handed out on the street—the actress also describes her religious journey from staunch Catholicism to staunch Presbyterianism. After moving to Los Angeles, she married, had four sons, and began to get the parts that matter—and pay. Though she loves acting, Heaton also loves her kids and admits it’s tough to raise them in present-day La-La Land: “Life was simpler in Cleveland. Parents were only expected to feed, clothe, house and educate their kids. Today you’re supposed to raise their self-esteem, give them piano and tae kwon do lessons, and teach them to download research for their kindergarten report.”
An invigorating breath of fresh air.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-50871-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002
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
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
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