A pleasant, amusing tale of a life in jokes, suitable for budding comedians and students of the form.
A memoir from an award-winning comedy writer whose collaborators and projects have often garnered a higher profile than him.
Zweibel—who has won multiple Emmy and Writers Guild of America awards, along with a Thurber Prize for his novel, The Other Shulman—has plenty of material to dish about, but his memoir is refreshingly light on dirt and scandal. As his lifelong friend Billy Crystal writes in the foreword, “If life were a forties movie, Alan would be called ‘a big lug.’ He is a large man with a sensitive persona and a heart of gold.” This is an amiable, big-lug, heart-of-gold sort of book, whether Zweibel is recounting the formative years of Saturday Night Live, where he seemingly got along with everyone; or detailing his bitter split with Garry Shandling, with whom he’d partnered on It’s Garry Shandling’s Show and with whom he later reconciled. The author’s writing partner at SNL was Gilda Radner, and his book about their relationship gave him his highest-profile publishing success. The deaths of Radner and Shandling bring the narrative into emotional depths that contrast with the rest of the breezy account. Zweibel chronicles how he got his start by selling jokes to the Catskills generation of comedians, at a price that “had soared to ten dollars a joke.” But the 1960s and ’70s experienced a generational sea change, and the author wanted to write and tell the jokes that these older comedians couldn’t. So he took to the stage himself, mainly to advance his writing career, where the man who would introduce him to Lorne Michaels and change his life told him he “was one of the worst comics he’d ever seen.” The career that followed ranges from early exposure to Larry David and Andy Kaufman to recent Broadway collaborations with Crystal and Martin Short.
A pleasant, amusing tale of a life in jokes, suitable for budding comedians and students of the form.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4197-3528-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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