Hard-core fans will undoubtedly enjoy their hero’s happy reminiscences, but nothing here will entice less starry-eyed...
For TV mainstay Barker, it’s all been fun and games.
A more-than-familiar face after some five decades on national television, including an astounding 35-year stint hosting The Price Is Right, the author delivers an unfailingly pleasant and breezy memoir…which is a problem. The supremely affable Barker’s account of his 85 years is mild to the point of nullity. The only dark notes are the premature death of his father and the loss of his beloved wife to lung cancer after 36 years of marriage. The author doesn’t mention the controversy and lawsuits (which included claims of sexual harassment) attending the firings of several glamorous on-set models for the show, nor his romantic relationship with one such model, Dian Parkinson, which also ended in legal action. Barker instead waxes nostalgic about his childhood on a South Dakota reservation (he is one-eighth Sioux), his training as a naval aviator in the last days of World War II (peace was declared before he saw combat) and his epic tenure as host of the longest-running game show in TV history. Stubbornly upbeat, he gives no indication that circumstances were ever less than hunky-dory for his neighbors on the reservation, paints his military service as a lark-filled romp and rhapsodizes endlessly about the fun and high spirits of his game-show days. Barker drops the names of many celebrity acquaintances—bizarrely, he studied karate with Chuck Norris—but his observations are limited to bromides like this characterization of fellow tanning enthusiast Julio Iglesias: “He was a really good guy. He was a lot of fun.” Even on the subject of animal-rights activism, a cause the author has tirelessly promoted for decades, he musters only generalities about the issue, along with a few cute stories concerning personal successes with rescued critters.
Hard-core fans will undoubtedly enjoy their hero’s happy reminiscences, but nothing here will entice less starry-eyed readers.Pub Date: April 6, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-59995-135-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Center Street/Hachette
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2009
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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