A potentially dramatic story about the price of the fast life, unfortunately drowned by an adolescent mindset.
A wannabe model bottoms out in LA.
This thinly fictionalized story of onetime model Tobi Tobin is another in a long and somewhat venerable tradition of books about shallow young women who go in pursuit of shallow things and are ultimately swallowed up and spit out by the infernal LA glamour machine. Determined to escape the boredom of her teenage life, young Tobi drinks, smokes, and sleeps around before leaping at the chance to become a model. The inevitable disappointments that follow are only alluded to in a patchwork quilt of flashback and memories—unfortunately shot through with screenplay-style dialogue exchanges and even voice-over narration. The author’s “memoir”/first novel is largely set years later in LA as Tobi struggles to keep her low position in the business, finding modeling and acting gigs hard to come by. Eventually, she gets lucky and lands a job working the door at a new nightclub. In many ways, it’s a dream job, since it pays in cash, allows Tobi to sleep in, provides her with plentiful industry contacts and free booze, and demands that she exercise her inner snob by determining who should and shouldn’t be allowed in. These passages, which mostly come later in the story, are by far the most interesting and exciting, and indeed an entire book could have been written just about the ups and downs of the job. For Tobi, as well as for the reader, it’s a huge letdown, then, when the narrator goes home after work and sinks into a bath of self-pity—the author’s attempt to give her character a soul by allowing her to feel pity for various caricatures, like the angelic homeless kid who hangs by the entrance to her club every night, only reinforces a sense of irritating self-involvement.
A potentially dramatic story about the price of the fast life, unfortunately drowned by an adolescent mindset.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2003
ISBN: 0-7434-6496-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: MTV Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2003
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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