A humorous, lively and humane memoir.
A stand-up comedian’s upfront account of the personal struggles with homosexuality that underlay his successful career as an entertainer.
From an early age, Philadelphia native Glass knew he was different. Suffering from undiagnosed cases of ADD and dyslexia, he was relegated to special education classes in second grade. Glass survived his mislabeling as mentally handicapped and frequent family moves, cultivating a wicked sense of humor, which eventually made him popular with other students. Entering high school, however, he faced yet another challenge: being gay in a homophobic world. A successful open mike night performance at a local comedy club launched Glass into his career at age 16. After years of being the odd man out, he writes, “I’d finally found a place where I belonged.” Glass continued to thrive on stage, but offstage, his early encounters with gay men were as furtive as they were unfulfilling. He found his first long-term partner only after he moved to Los Angeles and was nearing 30. But both Glass and his partner still felt pressure to hide their identities and resorted to elaborate ruses—which included living together with a straight female friend—to hide their relationship. In the meantime, Glass’ career took him into TV, where he did commercials and comedy performances on such shows as Last Comic Standing. Yet fame could not make up for his inability to be honest about his homosexuality. Glass finally found his motivation to come out after the nationally publicized spate of gay teen suicides in 2010. Two years later, he finally revealed his homosexuality at age 47 on the podcast of fellow comedian Marc Maron. The author clearly seeks to entertain with this comic picaresque, yet like his idol George Carlin, he also seeks to tell the truth, which he does with compassion and empathy throughout.
A humorous, lively and humane memoir.Pub Date: June 3, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-1441-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014
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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