An uneven Hollywood memoir with a bit of divinity thrown in.
A tale of two Tobolowskys, divided by a positive midlife crisis.
In the author’s latest, ostensibly a memoir but difficult to characterize, prolific character actor Tobolowsky (The Dangerous Animals Club, 2012) revisits his past with an eye toward finding some order, and some religion, in the chaos. The first half of the book follows the author’s life from his childhood in Dallas to the heady years of his burgeoning acting career in the 1980s. In the second half, Tobolowsky focuses on people and concepts related, in some way or another, to his return to Judaism. The two halves are very different in tone, subject matter, and approach. The author’s banal account of his early career mirrors the sort of hedonistic life story one might expect from a baby boomer in the entertainment world: drugs, parties, and money (or the lack thereof) dominate many of the storylines. Readers will be only mildly amused by the time Tobolowsky quips, “do you know how hard it is to spend $800 a week on yourself when you are not buying cocaine? In 1985 dollars?” The concept of faith doesn’t figure largely in the author’s story until the mid-1990s and his rather sudden return to traditional Judaism. At this point, the memoir gains more gravity but also becomes less streamlined, turning from a TMZ–style tell-all to a collection of vignettes about faith, difficult decisions, and people important to him. To be sure, Tobolowsky includes some truly worthwhile stories, not the least of which is a lengthy treatment of an Auschwitz survivor he came to know and whose story he decided to share through film. The author succeeds as a writer in that his prose captures the imagination and keeps readers’ attention; as a memoir, however, the book is aimless, oddly structured, and only tangentially related to his supposed theme.
An uneven Hollywood memoir with a bit of divinity thrown in.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4767-6646-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
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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