Sincere but slight, best taken with a joint.
Confessions of a pot smoker from comic Chong, who depicts his nine months in the federal pen for selling high-quality glass bongs on the Internet.
Expanding his act without partner Cheech Marin, the aging hipster recalls his impoverished Calgary childhood and salutes his family and friends as he describes the 2003 raid and subsequent trial in which the authorities argued that drug paraphernalia supported terrorism. The book’s second half begins as, sporting extra underwear, Chong heads for the minimum-security hoosegow. There he finds that his popularity outside continues inside. As a friendly con, he joins a sweat lodge, tries gardening, builds a kiln, reads the I Ching. (His memoir takes its format from that ancient program.) He meditates. “Some religions base their entire philosophy around the practice,” he notes, “and some religions use meditation as a religion.” Chong waxes righteous in a heartfelt ’60s flower-child manner. He offers a mélange of decent social consciousness and blameless self-regard. He believes his sojourn in jail is the establishment’s punishment for his free stoner lifestyle. The Great Bong Raid and his arrest were, he believes, at the behest of the Republican Christian Right. The controllers of the Oval Office have it in for him personally. Despite his loyal fan base, Chong’s manifesto is not likely to prompt regime change in America. On he sermonizes, though, with sweet assurance. For as long as he can remember, he has “always had a special relationship with God.” He knows the key to Heaven and humanity’s real mission in Life. He expounds on the major problems facing the world today and the only way to be truly happy. When you have dignity, he says, you have respect. Life, he offers, is like golf. (Or like a box of chocolates. Whatever.) Preaching love and cannabis, this tract by a good ol’ hippie contains less than meets the I Ching. It’s also just a bit addled.
Sincere but slight, best taken with a joint.Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2006
ISBN: 1-4169-1554-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2006
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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