convincing than the complaints of many an outraged former subscriber.
Novelist and ex-staffer Adler (Politics, 1988, etc.) offers an accusatory dirge for the William Shawn New Yorker that is
actually three volumes in one—to its ultimate cost. Adler’s first volume is a brisk analysis of the magazine’s decline under S.I. Newhouse’s ownership. The new regime—whose ascent had been unwittingly prepared for by beloved longtime editor Shawn’s unwillingness to anoint a successor—mounted an expensive chase for new subscribers at the cost of alienating the old, ran color ads that interrupted the magazine’s formerly sacrosanct columns of printed copy, and accelerated the New Yorker’s uneasy embrace of the New Left politics personified by Jonathan Schell. Adler keeps interrupting her indictment, however, for digressive accounts of her own friends and adventures at the magazine. While many of these recollections—of Donald Barthelme, Shawn’s son Wallace, Adler’s arrest in a subway sweep while she was on her way to cover the Ariel Sharon libel trial—are vivid and memorable, none adds authority to her diagnosis of the magazine’s ills. Instead, personal history and philippic meet up in her third volume to create a piquant anthology of invective bound to satisfy everyone but its targets. Thus, in Adler’s view, the rival New Yorker memoirs of Lillian Ross and Ved Mehta are self-serving and embroidered; Pauline Kael’s movie reviews are “inaccurate, sneering, mean”; Newhouse publisher Steven Florio is “young, blustering, cheerful, coarse, incompetent”; Newhouse editor Robert Gottlieb is “almost comedically incurious”; and Watergate Judge John Sirica (who might have thought himself safe from harm in a New Yorker memoir) is “corrupt, incompetent, and dishonest.” The resulting hybrid offers many pleasures, but none of them makes Adler’s heartfelt insider’s diatribe against Newhouse, recent editors Gottlieb and Tina Brown, and the long-standing weaknesses that left the magazine vulnerable to them any more
convincing than the complaints of many an outraged former subscriber.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2000
ISBN: 0-684-80816-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2000
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
PERSPECTIVES
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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