None
Earnest memoir of Hamill's drinking days as a Brooklyn youth and young reporter. Now sober 20 years, Hamill (Tokyo Sketches, 1992, etc.) looks back on his family life in Brooklyn during the Depression and WW II, when his father Billy's drinking became a model for his own liquid career, despite a vow not to follow in dad's footsteps. As a young man in Ireland, Billy lost a leg playing soccer, but his agility as a player remained legendary as the author grew up. Alcohol, Hamill says, removed his father from any close contact with him or his mother, and the boy aged without any real models for family life. Hamill began drinking as a bonding exercise with his street buddies—but he felt apart from them anyway, was drawn to cartooning (he spells out the history of comic strips in great detail), and, later, took lessons from Burne Hogarth, writer/illustrator of the Tarzan comic strip. Hamill quit school to work in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, joined the Navy during the Korean War, later entered newspaper work as a rewrite man on the New York Post. Some background about the author's beloved Post and fellow reporters, editors, and columnists is included here, but this is no Front Page memoir in the manner of Ben Hecht. Hamill tells of watering holes favored by staffers; his lack of contact with his own wife and family; divorce; his entry into the celebrity life with Shirley MacLaine; travels in Mexico, Spain, and elsewhere; and of his putting down the glass forever on New Year's Eve 1972, doing it alone and without AA. Hamill's various ideas about why he drank are all welcome, but his more crushing humiliations as a drinker fail to make us squirm, while his readable, workaday, humorless style keeps this from placing among the more forceful books about alcoholism. Maybe it should have been a novel.
None NonePub Date: Jan. 19, 1994
ISBN: 0-316-34108-8
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1993
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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