It’s no great revelation that “all of us could use a good laugh these days,” but this author delivers more than just one,...
A deliriously, levitatingly funny memoir.
Humor columnist Gilman (Kiss My Tiara, not reviewed) may have been girlie and ambitious as a kid, but she always had her subversive, countercultural New York City family to keep those sentiments in perspective. “Heresy had become a family tradition” in the Gilman household, where urban paganism possessed a natural buoyancy. From her parents—once they had pummeled her out of the “fugue of perpetual arousal” that resulted from her discovery of sex—the author acquired a love of life’s grotesque ironies, like learning that she had to pay to get in to Auschwitz. The thread of tough humor working its way through this memoir serves to backlight moments of exquisite realization (during puberty “your body starts changing subtly, like a shoreline”) and startling, genuine epiphanies: The week she spent visiting concentration camps, the author writes, showed her “how spoiled and ill-equipped I was to cope with the viciousness of the world.” She allows us to see how vulnerable and naïve a drama queen she can be, but then gets back to the yin and yang of it all, noting that “devoutly religious people made me irritable . . . their rectitude and moral certainty just made me want to act out even more.” Gilman is both pathetic and upbeat, sharp and capable of recognizing sharpness in others. At her first job, she spouts a little radical rhetoric and gets a zinger in return: “You know where workers of the world unite? The unemployment line.” In what may be the most disarming scene here, this modern anti-bride will fall in love with a full-blown, pouffy white wedding dress. Yes, she will say, there is so much that is ridiculous and passionate and deluded in life—go look in any mirror.
It’s no great revelation that “all of us could use a good laugh these days,” but this author delivers more than just one, and that makes her special.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-446-67949-6
Page Count: 365
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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