Serious subject; vain, vacuous treatment. (16 pp. b&w photos, mercifully not seen)
Young man survives violent childhood to play big-time college football, perform in some forgettable films, party with Melanie Griffith, and travel the country speaking on behalf of the National Network to End Domestic Violence.
In a random, roving, forgettable, and largely regrettable text, Rivers seems unsure about what sort of book he’s writing. Is it a memoir of child abuse? A play-by-play account of his high-school and college football games? A wistful story about how he almost made it in pro football and Hollywood? A handbook of ways to describe attractive women (the only type he ever seems to notice)? A catalogue of clichés? His memoir is all of these and more. The author’s brutal father appears to have been an artist of abuse, punching his children regularly for minor infractions of his draconian household code and kicking his pregnant wife in the stomach. Dad tied young Victor to a kitchen chair and hit his hands with a meat tenderizer, burned his stomach with a red-hot knife blade (this after two days of beatings), tied him up again and whipped him with a dog chain. Baseball, football, and hot women eventually saved Rivers from a life of depravity and despair. One charming two-page anecdote reveals how he once emptied a room of film-watching Miami Dolphins with a really raunchy fart; he claims his fellow linemen were proud of his accomplishment. (These were, of course, the offensive linemen.) Naturally, he learns other important Life Lessons from football, a game whose drama Rivers compares to that of Shakespeare’s. The author repeatedly praises his own looks, sense of humor, and terpsichorean grace. He marvels at his luck when he finds himself at a Hollywood soiree standing in the kitchen with Melanie Griffith, Madonna, Cher, and Demi Moore—it’s a wonderful life! Eventually, he finds True Love, has a son, and gets a significant gig going around telling his sensational stories.
Serious subject; vain, vacuous treatment. (16 pp. b&w photos, mercifully not seen)Pub Date: April 26, 2005
ISBN: 0-7434-8788-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2005
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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