A funny, insightful homage to movie love and an honest account of growing up, personally and professionally.
A comedian’s lively memoir about his movie addiction.
“All this filming isn’t healthy.” That's the advice given to the title character in Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960), and comedian and actor Oswalt (Zombie Spaceship Wasteland, 2011) would no doubt say the same goes for viewing. In this lively memoir, the author focuses on his early 1990s career, when time was divided between hustling the Los Angeles stand-up circuit and filling his head with every available movie. As he devoured film after film, he told himself that he was getting an education: “As I filled in each hole in my movie buff’s incomplete knowledge, perhaps I was unlocking some secret level of skill I had as a comedian.” Oswalt was also thinking of the Woody Allen career arc: Germinate in the hothouses of comedy clubs and movie houses and blossom as a brilliant auteur. Instead, watching movies took over, alienating him from life and people: “Don’t they want to talk about the movies of the newly rediscovered French crime master Jean-Pierre Melville, or the Dogme 95 movement, or the dozen or so hidden references in the latest Tarantino film? Why are people so boring?” Oswalt tells a variety of interesting stories—of half-assing his way through his days as a MADtv sketch writer, pissing off Jerry Lewis, obsessing over his first tiny film role, hearing an aging actor bellow drunken commentary during a screening of Citizen Kane—but he doesn’t go out of his way to score punch lines. Actually, he’s on to something more serious, which is how movies can simultaneously inspire and stunt ambition. After all, who has time to write a screenplay when a remastered version of Dr. Strangelove starts in a few hours?
A funny, insightful homage to movie love and an honest account of growing up, personally and professionally.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-1451673210
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
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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