Detailed, objective, and valuable. (b&w photos)
Lenny Bruce’s career was a rhapsody in blue material. His comedy made him a master of free speech; his death sanctified him. Here, two thoughtful lawyers explore in depth some of the comic’s tribulations and trials.
There’s not much about the man himself. (For straight biography, readers should go back to Albert Goldman’s controversial Ladies and Gentlemen: Lenny Bruce!, 1974.) This is, rather, an exhaustive study of the comedian’s obscenity trials. The legendary prosecutions for dispensing dirty words a generation ago is the topic of discussion. It’s a narrative of how a hipster who worked with junkie jazz bands and hooker strippers became a defender of the Constitution simply by repeating common words for body parts, excreta, and sexual activity. His misdemeanor trials were widely—and inaccurately—reported. The authors set the record straight from the first arrest in San Francisco in 1961. Arrests followed across the country, culminating with the most hotly contested trial in New York. By 1970, the case against Bruce’s co-defendant (operator of the club where he uttered the words) was overturned. But it was too late for Bruce. He died more than three years before of a morphine overdose, booked, it seemed, more frequently in police stations than into clubs, sick, bankrupt, and killed, some said, by the law. The application of the law by both prosecution and defense is deconstructed even-handedly. The major problem may have been the defendant, who fancied himself a legal expert. Playing a shtarker Jewish lawyer, Lenny communicated improperly with judges, missed court dates, dismissed counsel. He wanted to do his act in court; judges wanted to wash his mouth with soap. Today, Bruce is venerated not because he worked blue or talked trash, but because he was truly funny and, more importantly, because he offered honest, seminal social commentary. An audio CD is included so readers may hear, among redundant exposition, the comedian himself, spritzing and killing at top speed.
Detailed, objective, and valuable. (b&w photos)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2002
ISBN: 1-57071-986-1
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
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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