by Gary M. Pomerantz ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 23, 2018
A moving, maddening look at a storied partnership that might have been a beautiful friendship as well.
Journalist and historian Pomerantz (Writing and Reporting/Stanford Graduate Program in Journalism; Their Life’s Work: The Brotherhood of the 1970s Pittsburgh Steelers, Then and Now, 2013, etc.) delivers a sturdy work at the intersection of sports history and race relations.
Bob Cousy, one of the best point guards ever, came up at a time when players had little representation or power. Yet he was seemingly fearless, and not just in pushing back when he disagreed with tough-as-nails coach Red Auerbach or the front office. (When Auerbach said of Cousy’s fancy dribbling and passing, “the criterion of a great passer is the completion of the pass,” Cousy’s reply was, “after a man had played with me for a few weeks…there is no excuse for his being fooled.”) As captain, Cousy built a well-oiled machine that got more powerful with the addition of Bill Russell at center. Yet this was the late 1950s, and though Cousy had organized the first successful NBA players’ union, he could do nothing about the racism Russell faced, as when he tried to buy a house in the suburbs to find that the “white neighbors there objected strenuously”—then broke into his house and “defecated in his bed.” Russell responded bitterly that he played for the Celtics but emphatically not for Boston. His emergence as a powerful voice for the civil rights movement didn’t win him any fans in Southie, especially when he said, “we have got to make the white population uncomfortable and keep it uncomfortable, because that is the only way to get their attention.” The author’s reportage and research are thoroughly up to the stuff of the standard sports biography, but the narrative acquires its greatest force when, long after the events described, Cousy expresses regret that he didn’t do more to support Russell: “I [ran] into literally my first angry black man….I think this simply scared me off.” Nor has Russell mellowed—and nor should he.
A moving, maddening look at a storied partnership that might have been a beautiful friendship as well.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-7352-2361-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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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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