Items related to Time on Fire: My Comedy of Terrors
Synopsis
Based on the author's one-man off-Broadway show, a candid memoir of illness and survival describes his diagnosis wuth acute myeloid leukemia, his bizarre odyssey in and out of medical centers and hospitals, and his humor and determination in the face of fear
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From Publishers Weekly
While some adaptations from theater go limp as prose, Handler has expanded his off-Broadway play about surviving leukemia into a captivating memoir. Laced with anger, punctuated by humor and fueled by his indomitable will to survive, Handler's story is entertaining, harrowing and ennobling. A successful actor, at 24 he was forced to face his mortality. He provides gimlet-eyed portraits of an often uncaring (yet sometimes deeply loving) medical world and the ugly procedures he must undergo. To survive, Handler learned "opportunistic optimism," drawing on inspirational literature, even consulting a psychic, all the while aided by his girlfriend, Jackie. He's forced to confront his family's craziness and his own emotional traumas. He can find humor in retelling his predicament?as in describing hospital sex?while his accounts of the mental bargains he and other patients make suggest a reckoning with ultimates. Readers will be appalled at instances of the often substandard medical treatment he receives and spellbound by his attempts to monitor his recovery. Considering himself "one of the very luckiest of the unluckiest people," Handler speaks with a fresh voice that is entirely riveting. Author tour.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Until he was diagnosed with leukemia at the age of 24, Handler was a talented actor with a promising Broadway career and all the time in the world. But the bleak prognosis transformed time into "a concrete entity" not to be wasted. Resigning his understudy's role in Neil Simon's Biloxi Blues, Handler checked himself into New York's Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, embarking on a five-year battle to get a second chance at life and time. Adapted from his successful off-Broadway one-man play, Time on Fire recounts with grim humor Handler's hellish journey through the land of the sick: insensitive doctors; experimental chemotherapies sometimes worse than the illness; awkward sex with his girlfriend in a hospital bathroom; remission, relapse, remission. Self-absorbed (with the actor's desire to be at the center of attention), Handler does not always come across as an admirable figure; he was hard on his supportive parents and girlfriend. "I must have been sheer hell to be around," he admits. "But I know it saved my life on several occasions." His honesty and tenacity, however, enable readers to cheer his eventual recovery. For popular collections.
Wilda Williams, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Time on Fire: My Comedy of Terrors
Seller: World of Books (was SecondSale), Montgomery, IL, U.S.A.
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Time on Fire: My Comedy of Terrors
Seller: World of Books (was SecondSale), Montgomery, IL, U.S.A.
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Time on Fire: My Comedy of Terrors
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Time on Fire: My Comedy of Terrors
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Time on Fire: My Comedy of Terrors
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Time on Fire: My Comedy of Terrors
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Time on Fire
Seller: World of Books Inc, Montgomery, IL, U.S.A.
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Paperback. Condition: Very Good. Based on Evan Handler's hit off-Broadway play (called by The New York Times laceratingly funny and self-revealing), Time on Fire is a remarkable memoir of illness and survival, love and hope--shot through with anger, humor, and piercing eloquence. Evan Handler was twenty-four and already an accomplished actor when he was diagnosed with acute leukemia and told that his chances for survival were slim. Resigning his role in Neil Simon's Biloxi Blues, Handler checked into New York Memorial's Cancer Center and began a bizarre, sometimes uproarious five-year journey in and out of hospitals--a raucous rump through Hell--only to face an equally arduous return to the life he left behind. Time on Fire is the story of Handler's passage into a twilight world: a place of lonely, haunting despair lit by moments of exultation and hilarity; a world where the truly horrible and the hysterically funny not only coexist but seem to become the same thing. Told with the trenchant humor of a survivor, it takes a wry, unflinching look at the absurdity of fighting for life in a place where death is what is most expected, and a health care system on the brink of madness. It is the story of refusing to succumb to the pressures of conformity that threatened his recovery and of the fierce struggle to find the road back to health--at all costs. From the comic accounts of his trip to a Madison Avenue sperm bank (Nothing but the best address for my progeny) and his experimentation with psychic healing, to the portrayal of the unraveling effects of his illness on his family and girlfriend, Handler records with astonishing precision the full emotional range of his experience. The result is a bracing, achingly poignant account of his determination to steal time and reclaim life. Glowing with uncommon insights and uncompromising honesty, Time on Fire is a testament to the bravery and the endurance of the human spirit. Seller Inventory # CIN0805050671VG