A breezy read through a breezy life.
The anecdotal sequel to the cult actor’s bestselling memoir.
Campbell (Make Love the Bruce Campbell Way, 2005, etc.) describes this book as “part two of a three-act story,” and it often feels like a place holder, following the surprise success of If Chins Could Kill (2001) and anticipating whatever is to come. A perennially working actor in B-movies and cable series, the author explains the extended interval between his first book and this one: “like a slow-growing oak, it could take fifteen years for me to amass enough anecdotes for another autobiography.” During this time, Campbell avoided typecasting by playing both Santa Claus and a 68-year-old Elvis Presley suffering from penis cancer. He had adventures shooting movies in Bulgaria, New Zealand, and the Navajo country of New Mexico. He and his wife moved to Oregon, where he joined the Elks Lodge, whose members thought he was making fun of them when he took the pledge. “I’m an actual actor, so I’m prone to be a bit more ‘theatrical,’ ” he reassured them. Then he explains to readers, “aside from being old-fashioned and a little kitschy, the organization donates a lot of money to charity and the drinks are really cheap!” Among other discoveries, Campbell learned that Oregon culture is possibly even crazier than that in LA and that driving there is definitely more dangerous. And the secret to Hollywood? “It’s really just a big, tangled web of schmoes who keep running into each other over and over.” Fortunately, one of Campbell’s schmoes is Sam Raimi, a lifelong friend since they were kids playing with Super-8 film and later one of the highest-paid directors in the business. Through Raimi, Campbell landed bit roles in the first three Spider-Man movies. The author’s work on the Burn Notice TV series and his cult movies, including Evil Dead, have brought him a variety of fruitful opportunities, including an invitation to entertain the troops in Iraq.
A breezy read through a breezy life.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-12560-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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
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