A sometimes-humorous, self-reflective chronicle of a triumphant journey through a troublesome childhood, chaotic young...
Actress, talk-show host and documentary film producer Lake is returning to television. Is there a better way to crank up the excitement level for a new talk show than with a tell-all memoir for your fans?
The author begins with a discussion of her abuse as a 7-year-old by the handyman in the family’s basement while her mother sat upstairs. Her parents’ lack of response to her trauma laid the groundwork for her emotional problems, manifested in Lake’s overeating habits. “To this day,” she writes, “I believe that it was my parents’ silence in the wake of the abuse—even more than the abuse itself—that wounded me so badly.” After seeing a Broadway production of Annie with her grandmother, Lake was determined to pursue her dream of becoming an actor. During her freshman year at college, Lake landed a starring role as Tracy Turnblad, a “fat girl who can really dance,” in John Waters’ Hairspray. From then on, the author’s life became a series of professional and personal successes followed by calamities and weight gain. At one time Lake weighed 260 pounds, but she landed a gig as the host of a provocative talk show, which aired for 11 years. She married and had two children, but her marriage ended in a nasty divorce. The births of her children changed Lake’s life, and she became a passionate advocate for the birthing rights movement, resulting in her documentary, The Business of Being Born. Following numerous failed relationships, author found a man who gives her “truly unconditional love.” For readers who revel in the vicissitudes of the lives of media personalities, Lake’s narrative will be a treat.
A sometimes-humorous, self-reflective chronicle of a triumphant journey through a troublesome childhood, chaotic young adulthood and fulfilled middle age.Pub Date: April 17, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-2717-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: March 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2012
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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