For Howard Stern devotees, the stoners who harassed members of the school band in the high school cafeteria, and all their...
A tedious tale of substance abuse told by a self-admitted opiate-addicted, self-loathing slob.
Comedian Lange (Too Fat to Fish, 2008), best known as a co-host on Howard Stern’s radio show, has made a lucrative career of being obnoxious. The author explains he was driven to make listeners laugh by “busting people’s chops” and boasts that his cocaine- and heroin-fueled tantrums on the air and train-wreck TV appearances were legendary. Written with the assistance of former Rolling Stone writer Bozza (co-author: Slash, 2007, etc.), Lange’s story has careened from bender to binge, with a few half-hearted attempts at getting straight. Considering his severely altered state during his two-year slide, his recall of how many Vicodin pills he smashed and snorted, and every prostitute he hired is remarkable. Throughout this overlong book, he remains aware of the grief he caused loved ones who tried to help him get better, but he's also proud of the heights of obnoxiousness he reached. To his credit, Lange doesn’t blame others for his becoming an addict, nor does he expect anyone to clean up the mess he made. But he is a contradiction, aware he feels equally shameful and proud of his wasted condition, and explains that he was driven by both greed and love for the drugs he hates. Ultimately, his stories of countless blackouts and emergency room visits become tiresome. Reading the book is like watching a fly bounce off the window screen after you open it, refusing to escape despite your encouragement and exasperation, and Lange’s self-indulgence makes it tough to feel much sympathy for him. He describes feeling “paralyzed with depression, guilt and embarrassment” after he moved in with his mother, but his repeated refusals to stay in treatment programs try readers’ patience.
For Howard Stern devotees, the stoners who harassed members of the school band in the high school cafeteria, and all their buddies doubled over with laughter beside them.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4767-6511-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
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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