Humor at its most vigorous and unsparing.
A Pakistani-born comic's account of how he sought salvation in stand-up comedy and then found a new home in Australia.
Growing up in Karachi, a city bloodied by political violence, Shah spent most of his youth “reading, drawing comic books and masturbating.” The first time he left Pakistan was in the late 1990s when he came to the United States to attend college, major in English, and dream of becoming “Pakistan’s answer to Stephen King.” Never especially religious, Shah became a practicing Muslim after 9/11. But when he returned home, he found that the Islam he believed was anything but a religion of peace and promptly turned atheist. “My life would have been a lot easier if I’d just gotten an earring and done some drugs,” he writes. After a stint in advertising that led him to “a deep existential crisis,” Shah found his way into journalism, a career he thought would help him make sense of the “bomb blasts, suicide attacks, gun fights [and] assassinations” that were part of daily life in Pakistan. Witnessing so much bloodshed had the added effect of eventually pushing the author into comedy. He joined an improvisational comedy troupe that earned a devoted following in Karachi and accolades at a Manchester theater festival. Shah later went on to produce, direct, and host a short-lived news satire show called News Weakly. After the show was cut, he left journalism and returned to advertising while continuing to hone his craft. Determined to find a better life, Shah and his wife moved to Australia. There, he not only found the freedom to practice his art, but also became part of the growing national debate about the place of political refugees in Australian society. The narrative is refreshing for its openness about religion, sexuality, and politics, topics that, for the most part, are taboo in the Islamic world. Honest and inspiring, Shah’s book is a reminder of how laughter is not only necessary, but also life-sustaining.
Humor at its most vigorous and unsparing.Pub Date: July 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-74331-934-5
Page Count: 282
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2015
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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
