Arriving on the heels of Sticky Fingers, Joe Hagan’s biography of Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner, Green’s memoir is both...
A lusty, reflective, score-settling memoir from the woman who steered a chaotic career course between Rolling Stone and The Sopranos.
In this debut book, Green recounts the lively, raucous tale of how she found, lost, and regained her groove, smoking dope and winning Emmys in the process. The well-educated daughter of “upwardly striving East Side Jews,” she headed west in the late 1960s with a diploma from Brown University, a rich boyfriend, and only a vague sense of what to do when she got there. By dint of luck, as well as talent, Green wound up at Rolling Stone, scoring a cover story on Marvel Comics (where she had briefly worked) that established her trademark droll tone. “Go be ironic” was her mission, and she delivered with numerous significant pieces, including profiles of Dennis Hopper at his most obnoxious and David Cassidy at his most naïve. Besides breaking a pot-befogged glass ceiling—she distinguished herself among “the brainy and evolved sugar candy that was the girls of Rolling Stone”—she happily indulged her inner wild child. She also got sloppy—e.g., setting out to interview the children of the late Robert F. Kennedy, she “crossed a journalistic line” by sleeping with his son. Although her career briefly bottomed out, Green staged an impressive comeback as a TV writer who could navigate both the high (Northern Exposure, The Sopranos) and mid-range (Blue Bloods) plateaus. Her story is wildly picaresque—upper-middle-class to rags to homes in New York and Los Angeles—revealing (especially when dealing with the backstage politics of TV production), and at times wearyingly materialistic and self-absorbed.
Arriving on the heels of Sticky Fingers, Joe Hagan’s biography of Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner, Green’s memoir is both a solid insider’s account and a happy-go-lucky, lifelong coming-of-age story.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-44002-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 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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