The strange, dark side of life, but a very real milieu.
Forget Las Vegas: you’ll never even beat the midway at the local carnival, says Fenton, who worked the circuit as a high-schooler.
Fenton went on to be a reporter for The National Enquirer and to write a couple of humor books, but in the 1960s he was a bright kid with an unhappy home life. That made him an easy mark for schoolmate Jackie Brown, a student of the art of the swindle who declared, “ . . . every game on the midway . . . is all about science and the unchangeable laws of nature.” Impressed by Fenton’s ease with math, Brown took the boy under his wing and offered a tutorial in the ways of gambling. Fenton took to this line of work, which opened for a shy kid a world of thrills and, not incidentally, sex. Limning numerous episodes of deceit with the immediacy and clarity of a pure raconteur, he tells of moving up through the carny ranks from the floating-duck games to the genuine gambling venues. Carnies are as ready to ding their coworkers as they are the folks at the show, he notes; he cheated his boss for the same reason his boss had cheated him: because “as a general rule any carny who wasn’t an ignorant fool simply held out his rightful percentage, the one that God had ordained when he’d written the chapter on carnies in the Holy Bible.” Eventually, the author came to realize how easy it was to become “an asshole carny,” always ready to shaft the next character with too loose a grip on the weekly earnings. A metaphorical shoot-out ensued with his mentor, then Fenton headed off to the noble world of the University of Michigan. Well, not really. A week into the first semester, he again heard the call to the midway. From there it was an obvious next step to the tabloids.
The strange, dark side of life, but a very real milieu.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-5854-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004
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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