Stanhope offers good evidence that if our own families are messed up, there’s always someone who’s got it worse. Lively and...
In his first book, stand-up comedian Stanhope delivers a sympathetic though unenviable portrait of his multiply addicted, much troubled mother.
“After thirty-some years of ruthless drinking, it’s more than probable that I’ve fucked up a few details.” So run the author’s first words to readers, a warning that substance abuse and blue comedy are in the offing. Stanhope’s comedy, growing from the tradition of Bill Hicks and Sam Kinison, is built on sharp political and social observations mixed with the insistence on shocking with details of drug abuse, sexual escapades, and the like. His book is no disappointment in any of these regards: there are dog genitalia (“touching a dog’s dick is gross, and your mother touching a dog’s dick is far grosser, and gross equals hilarious”), oxygen tents, crack, deathbeds, adultery, suicide, and sundry other things not often mentioned in polite company. Stanhope pokes fun at himself most of all as he recounts a wandering, messed-up youth doing crap jobs while learning comedy by trial and error until hitting on some universal truths—e.g., “farts are the funniest things in life, and if you disagree, then you have no soul.” Underneath the humor lies an affecting character study of the author’s late mother, who, for her manifold faults, was his fiercest defender and ally. The book is Stanhope’s often rueful record of trying to come to terms with her while reckoning with his own emotions and trying to build a career through a haze of his own making. “In my head,” he writes, “she was just a bad drunk who felt abandoned and didn’t have the patience to wait for me to sort shit out. If anything, I begrudged her for the timing.”
Stanhope offers good evidence that if our own families are messed up, there’s always someone who’s got it worse. Lively and smart and, in the manner of the best comedy, as sad as it is funny.Pub Date: May 10, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-306-82439-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: March 7, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016
PROFILES
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
PERSPECTIVES
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