For a truly reflective, present-at-the-creation look at the long-running weekend mainstay, turn to Tom Shales and James...
A disappointing memoir from four-time Emmy winner Davis on his transgressive life and high times as an original writer with Saturday Night Live.
Much of this reads like a prototypical countercultural/showbiz autobiography: the upbringing in suburban Minnesota with a conservative father; the Jimi Hendrix concert that changed his life; obligatory drug-fueled hijinks in San Francisco and India; narrow scrapes with the law; friendships with Timothy Leary and Jerry Garcia. How could this recounting, a veritable miracle of memory given all the pot, LSD, coke, hashish and heroin consumed along the way, even occur? Davis—now rehabbed after three years in a methadone program in the mid-’90s—poses this question himself, noting what happened after he and fellow SNL writer Michael O’Donoghue snorted heroin on the way to John Belushi’s funeral: “My memory of the event is so flawed that it demonstrates how I sublimated this catastrophe.” Readers will grasp at anything, no matter how nasty or unspecific, to break the consistent deadpan delivery of these events, such as the author’s excoriation of short-lived SNL regulars Anthony Michael Hall and Robert Downey Jr. for behaving “like school bullies with a substitute teacher.” Although Davis discusses the highs and lows of his longtime friendship with entertainer-politician Al Franken—from their debut as stand-up comics at Dudley Riggs Brave New Workshop in Minneapolis through their hiring as SNL writers in July 1975—he is oddly silent on why they reconciled after an acrimonious breakup of their partnership in 1990. Twelve years with SNL provided countless stories but little perspective on its manic environment, nor on the creation of his memorable, censor-baiting skits (several are reproduced verbatim). Moreover, while Davis relates how Lorne Michaels forced his 1994 departure from the show, he never analyzes how the “brilliant” producer molded it into a pop-culture institution.
For a truly reflective, present-at-the-creation look at the long-running weekend mainstay, turn to Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller’s Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live (2002).Pub Date: March 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-8021-1880-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
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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