Entertaining fluff.
Just when you’d think memoirs couldn’t get more self-parodying, a first-time author spills all about her obsession with psychics.
Lassez, a sometimes-employed actress in L.A., turns to psychics to determine if she’ll ever land a big role, or a man. Though these seers are only occasionally accurate, and then only about the most obvious things, she gets hooked. Her self-styled “addiction” is really just a conceit that allows her to ramble on about life as a broke, 30-year-old singleton in Hollywood. She could have transformed the one-dimensional palaver into something a bit more substantial had she been willing to offer even a little self-scrutiny. In passing, Lassez mentions an Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder diagnosis and scoring some free Zoloft from the wife of a doctor, but the closest she ever comes to examining her fixation with tarot is wondering, “When would I land the role of ‘Sarah Lassez,’ a woman with a life?” Fortunately, the silly subject matter is redeemed by the author’s self-deprecating sensibility and deadpan humor. Lassez’s ruminations about an engagement ring that is never offered, her description of a week spent rehabbing at her parents’ ranch and her transcription of the one lone therapy session she attends are hilarious. She manages never to take herself too seriously—an important quality in a narrator who is constantly kvetching about being dumped. When told by her shrink to join a 12-step group, Lassez admits that she’s looked into it already, but there is no Psychics Anonymous: “If I was lucky enough to be addicted to heroin I’d be at a meeting right now.” Further bolstering the book’s oddball charm is a likable cast of supporting characters. Readers may turn the last page wishing they could hang out with Lassez’s best friend Gina, who deserves an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress in Creative Nonfiction.
Entertaining fluff.Pub Date: July 11, 2006
ISBN: 1-4169-1838-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2006
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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