The 18-year-old fraternity pledge’s guide to life.
Expensively educated child-of-privilege-turned-professional-asshole Max (Assholes Finish First, 2011, etc.) ends his “fratire” series with another memoir full of binge drinking, upchucking and general unhinged misanthropy.
Here the author cuddles up next to blowhard Bill O’Reilly, crackpot psychologists, Hollywood gossips and psychotic Army snipers. There are also plenty of repetitious barhopping stories involving Max and the angry gynophobes he hangs with, all out for some good old-fashioned recreational hate sex (or often just hate, period) with clueless sorority-type chicks. The Tucker Max formula for success? He interacts with people who have the rare disability of being even more moronic than he is—and so-called hilarity ensues. Beyond the predictable mouthing off about his “awesome” life, in this latest book we also get sections featuring Max’s boring “sexting” transcripts, a self-righteous diatribe against the mother of Miss Vermont (who sued him for libel), some routine white-trash strip-club experiences and a proud recollection of the time he beat up a frail European guy. There’s also a fond remembrance of his homosocial maritime bromance with one of the macho crab fisherman of Deadliest Catch fame: Although he vomited from seasickness during much of his Alaskan fishing expedition, he seemed to be much more at ease with the rough boys on the Time Bandit than with the unfortunate females he hits on in yuppie bars. We also learn some further startling new information about the author—he likes Southern rap and hates the French! Although there’s no telling how much honesty there is behind any of Max’s chauvinist bluster, undoubtedly the most believable statement in the book comes in the penultimate chapter, where he reveals the fact that he has no girlfriend or wife. Shocking.
The 18-year-old fraternity pledge’s guide to life.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-6903-9
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Blue Heeler Books
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2012
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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