Sunny heartbreak, with sarcasm that draws blood.
Star-hungry child of the ’70s becomes semi-actress and occasional writer in this thickly barbed autobiography.
Blame Augusten Burroughs. Or the torrent of childhood-obsessed irony that was the ’90s. In any case, accounts of youth during the Ford/Carter years must now come packed with eye-rolling details of the horrors of macramé, cringe-inducing crafts and Peter Frampton. Fortunately, in the hands of a well-honed satirist like the multi-syllabic author, such ironizing is done with sharp intent, mocking the memoirist herself as much as it does the decade. An inveterate self-dramatist from the bucolic streets of Sherman Oaks (“a progressive little settlement nuzzled on the graceful shoulder blade of Beverly Hills”), Woods was taking dancing and acting lessons almost before she knew who Frampton was. She transitioned from precocious wannabe actress to bright-eyed college student to sampler of LA’s finer hair-metal bands to drug dropout to almost-Playmate to Daily Show correspondent, occasional sitcom actress and Esquire columnist. Fortunately for readers, almost none of this is delivered in the expected manner, as the author is too busy firing off dense packets of self-lacerating and penetrating absurdity to get mired in solipsism. The structure takes some getting used to, delving heavily into selected portions of the author’s busy life—work as booker for Johnny Depp's Viper Room, a reporting trip for the Daily Show that became an exercise in self-loathing—before leaping lightly ahead, often years at a time. Her prose is carefully considered and nicely layered with multiple levels of irony (as befits any casualty of the ’90s): A complete emotional meltdown is always lurking just behind the waves of cultural zeitgeist humor.
Sunny heartbreak, with sarcasm that draws blood.Pub Date: July 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-7432-7491-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2007
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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