Intermittently funny but ultimately a frustrating missed opportunity.
In this debut work of nonfiction, Webb leaves his performance stage to examine “general expectations of manhood” and tell the stories that have made his life interesting.
This is more than a straightforward memoir, as the author delves into a variety of sociological issues, primarily those related to conceptions of manhood. “Often,” he writes, “when we tell a boy to ‘act like a man,’ we’re effectively saying, ‘Stop expressing those feelings.’ And if the boy hears that often enough, it actually starts to sound uncannily like, ‘Stop feeling those feelings.’ ” Throughout the book, Webb explores the different ways in which masculinity is perceived and enforced in culture, and he attempts to illustrate what happens when masculinity is challenged by a male himself. “The great thing about refusing to feel feelings is that, once you’ve denied them, you don’t have to take responsibility for them,” he writes. “Your feelings will be someone else’s problem—your mother’s problem, your girlfriend’s problem, your wife’s problem.” In trying to understand the consequences of a regimented male experience, Webb falls into consistent heteronormativity. It’s unfortunate that in a work focusing so incisively on understanding the male experience, the spectrum of masculinity is misrepresented. Interspersed through the comedy and memoir are rather myopic explanations of what boys, teenagers, and men are expected to do in society—e.g., not cry, not be a teacher’s pet, play sports, have lots of sex. While intended to be humorous, these categorizations will feel exasperating for many readers. But Webb stays true to his comedic self and provides comic relief amid situations of adolescent torpor: “I’m very proud of the fine sprinkling of pubic hairs I’ve managed to grow, although that area in general looks like the head of a ninety-year-old woman recently returned from a perm too many at the hairdresser’s.”
Intermittently funny but ultimately a frustrating missed opportunity.Pub Date: June 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-78689-008-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Canongate
Review Posted Online: Feb. 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
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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