With the help of former Sports Illustrated associate editor Yeager (co-author, with John Wooden: A Game Plan for Life: The...
Hulking NFL tackle and subject of the film The Blind Side (2009) blends practical advice with autobiography in this intimate ghetto-survival guide.
With the help of former Sports Illustrated associate editor Yeager (co-author, with John Wooden: A Game Plan for Life: The Power of Mentoring, 2009, etc.), Oher tells his often-compelling Horatio Alger story sans the entertainment-industry embellishment of the Hollywood version of his life in The Blind Side, first a book by Michael Lewis, then a popular movie. Oher’s young life was shaped by an intense love for sports, especially basketball and football, but also profoundly affected by the netherworld of the ghettoes in Memphis. The author writes about having to cope with an absentee father and an undependable, crack-smoking mother, and about his time bouncing around the foster-care system and supporting himself through petty theft. Eventually, he made decent money selling newspapers on street corners. His major first steps out of the ghetto came in high school, when, despite early trouble with academics, Oher was accepted to the reputable private school Briarcrest. However, his intermittent homelessness didn’t officially end until local Good Samaritan Leigh Ann Tuohy offered him the closest thing to a permanent residence he’d ever had. Tuohy’s guardianship served as a launching pad for Oher’s successful high-school athletic career, which led to a scholarship with the University of Mississippi and to an eventual first-round draft pick of the Baltimore Ravens. The book is strongest when Oher conveys his hard-won wisdom through specific examples and anecdotes from his life. When he dispenses more generalized advice, the narrative reads like a generic public-service announcement.Pub Date: Feb. 8, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-592-40612-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Gotham Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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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