A rambling, tedious narrative that may appeal to fans of James Frey–style, tough-guy confessionals.
A fevered memoir detailing how a surly bohemian, lost to alcoholism, was saved by marathon running.
Shubaly, a musician and raconteur who’s published several bestselling Kindle Singles through Amazon (The Long Run, 2014, etc.), is straightforward about the self-regard he drowned in booze and bad behavior. “For someone who had moved to NYC with the bald intention of getting famous,” he writes, “my anonymity remained so pristinely intact one would think I’d been fighting to preserve it.” The author attributes his decadent lost years to a high-drama childhood, including an estranged father and chaotic family, a sudden cross-country move, and general lower-middle-class angst. This disaster-prone adolescence culminated in admission to Simon’s Rock, the “college for high schoolers,” in time to witness one of the first school shootings of the 1990s. By then, he’d disappeared into punk rock and binge drinking: “Winter came and, with it, darkness….A shot of liquor in the bottom of a chipped glass glowed like it was radioactive: if I take this shot, I will puke tonight. I drank them all.” In this tale of soused desperation, Shubaly dismisses as gullible tools everyone beyond his beleaguered siblings, lovers, and band mates, and he disregards the concept of editorial selectivity: passages focused on mooning over his college girlfriend or his gradual reconciliation with his father go on endlessly—yet he curtly dismisses the citywide trauma of 9/11. The arc of redemption, in which Shubaly forgoes alcohol for the rigors of “ultrarunning,” is similarly repetitious, albeit loaded with the author’s sense of personal triumph. “This was an accomplishment not even I could diminish,” he writes. “There was no denying it. I was one of those top-tier wackjobs.” Though Shubaly produces some humorous and trenchant observations about urban hipster culture, the craft and focus cannot match the grating level of self-absorption.
A rambling, tedious narrative that may appeal to fans of James Frey–style, tough-guy confessionals.Pub Date: March 8, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-61039-558-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
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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