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It's Only Temporary: The Good News and the Bad News of Being Alive | 
 enlarge | Author: Evan Handler
Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
Buy New: $15.20
You Save: $9.75 (39%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  4 reviews
Sales Rank: 1583
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 240
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 9.2 x 5.9 x 0.8
ISBN: 1594489955
Dewey Decimal Number: 362.196994190092
EAN: 9781594489952
ASIN: 1594489955
Publication Date: May 1, 2008 (New: Last 30 Days)
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: New in dj.
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Product Description
A provocative, funny, and whip- smart memoir of how one man learned to find joy in his own life after years of hand-to-hand combat with death.
Actor and author Evan Handlers new book, Its Only Temporary, is both a deeply personal memoir and a series of meditations on life, love, faith, gratitude, and mortality. In closely examining his own triumphs, mistakes, and less-than-ideal relationships since his miraculous recovery from a supposedly incurable leukemia more than twenty years ago, Handler zeroes in on the most profound question facing every human being: How can a person live well with the knowledge that time is limited? In doing so, Handler has created a poignant and wildly funny rumination on the ironies of human existence.
Structured as a collection of incisive and probing autobiographical stories , Its Only Temporary is a startlingly candid portrait of one mans struggle to find love and happiness within a life he knows hes lucky just to have. By turns hilarious and heart-wrenching, blunt and shocking, Handlers defiantly unconventional memoir ultimately succeeds as both a stirring love story and a classic coming-of-age tale. Its Only Temporary celebrates the transformation from boy to maneven if it took Handler more than forty years to get there.
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| Customer Reviews:
Its only temporary, Timeless May 13, 2008
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
I first found "Its Only Temporary" in the book review of the L.A. Times
a couple of weeks ago. After reading I believe it should be front and center. The book(on the surface) is about Evan Handler's life(Harry SxtheCt) after he had beaten leukemia and what it is like to be alive when most including yourself thought you are not going to be. But
as I say thats just the surface. "IOT" reveals a life that can be understood and appreciated as well as if you were sitting with him in person and he was actually telling you from his heart his story.
And he tells it with the flair and sensitivity that makes you truly know what makes Evan Handler tick.
Now for the faint of heart I will warn you that Handler is very descriptive about his life and his feelings but anything that can be considered overdone is completely offset by his honesty and wit.
I have to say of all the things he got right maybe two of the best were U,S. politicians talk too much about religion and not enough about improving the economy so there are two bidets in every American home.
I have to say after reading "Its only Temporary" it makes you feel that
Handler would make an interesting friend for what time and life's fortunes will allow.
Honest. Refreshing. Heartening. May 9, 2008
4 out of 5 found this review helpful
IT'S ONLY TEMPORARY is a most engaging work. I was impressed by Evan Handler's candor - and charmed by his sense of humor. And I was especially captivated by the story of how he met and then fell passionately in love with his wife. It's a romantic tale - complete with a soaring finish! I found myself exhilarated reading about his discovery of this deeper love - how it transformed his life and what it taught him about past experiences with relationships and his own humanity. Handler writes with great wit and style. Somehow his observations manage to resonate deep insight and entertain at the same time. His approach to storytelling is intimate and universal - philosophical and practical....I believe this book has something important to say about love and being fully alive.
Funny, Inspiring, Fantastic... May 3, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
I've just finished reading this book, and I think it's wonderful on many levels. On the surface, it's a funny, rollicking good read, filled with entertaining stories, told by a quick-witted author. Additionally, the individual stories add up to one of the most amazing, inspiring, and unabashed love stories I've ever read - particularly interesting coming from a man. Going deeper, the author has attempted something truly interesting in his structuring of the book. In the preface he makes clear his interest in writing a book that allows readers to get to know the book's narrator the way we get to know new friends: via individual stories from his life, often told out of chronological order. While this can occasionally be momentarily disorienting, there's a great deal of satisfaction that comes as the clues and pieces of Mr. Handler's life eventually fit together. Further, he uses this technique as a way to allow himself to look back on and reexamine, during later portions of the book, many of his actions and choices from the earlier portions. It turns out to be a very effective method of first revealing, and then reflecting on, his own life.
I found this to be a thoroughly enjoyable book. It was fun to read, and surprised me often with the depth of its perceptions - and how easily and entertainingly they were imparted. Bravo.
 Second volume of memoirs May 2, 2008
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
Evan Handler's IT'S ONLY TEMPORARY picks up where is earlier memoir 'Time on Fire' left off. Where the first volume detailed his battle with lukemia this book tells of his attempts to restart his acting career and personal life once he was cured of the illness. He writes of being cast in the Broadway production of 'Six Degrees of Seperation'and of his abortive attempts to commit to one woman. He writes of his attempt to volunteer at the hospital where he once underwent treatment and how the hospital,recalling what he'd written about them in the earlier book, refused his offer. The book ends with the story of how he met his wife. (At a bookstore appearence he read one of the better chapters; the meeting of his in-laws and the cultural differences between his Northern Italian wife and family and Americans.) These chapters are so good that the book concludes on a wonderful note.
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