The book will certainly please longtime fans, whether or not it attracts new ones.
A hit-and-miss debut collection of humorous essays from Daily Show correspondent Bee.
The best pieces here are very funny, and the author’s skewed, satirical perspective, honed on the show, is evident throughout most of the book. Particularly memorable essays cover the Canadian writer’s pubescent crush on Jesus (“I didn’t need to be a bride of Christ. I was comfortable just dating Him, and if things got a little more serious, then that was cool, too…I had a notebook dedicated to ironing out the details of my postmarital name change. Samantha Christ. Mrs. Jesus Christ, Lamb of God”); her propensity for attracting pedophiles trying to ply her with free pizza, and with strange men exposing themselves to her (“A penis is a fair-weather friend at best, but for some reason it’s always sunny in Bee-town. And I don’t mean that as a compliment”); her courtship with her husband Jason Jones, also a Daily Show correspondent; and the couple’s misadventures in children’s theater (“Children’s entertainment was a natural fit for me because (a) I dislike other people’s children, and (b) I was unemployable in virtually every other aspect of show business”). Bee is at her best in “May December Never Come,” about the yuckiness of dating across generations and having your boyfriend mistaken for your father, or vice versa (“the only way to describe how this makes me feel is to say that it makes my vagina nauseous, if that’s even physically possible”). Lesser pieces meander, making it hard to find the point, while others are too scattered. Her conversational phrasing suggests an engaging monologist, but as a writer she would benefit from a stronger edit.
The book will certainly please longtime fans, whether or not it attracts new ones.Pub Date: June 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4391-4273-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2010
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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