The pitcher who served up Bobby Thomson’s 1951 pennant-winning homerun, the legendary “Shot Heard ‘Round the World,” spins yarns from a bygone era when baseball was still king.
Baseball, by virtue of its place of prominence in early American sporting culture and its gently rhythmic, almost lackadaisical pace of play, has long been a prime conduit for nostalgia-driven memoirs. Branca, ably assisted by veteran co-author Ritz (Blues All Around Me: The Autobiography of B.B. King, 2011, etc.), adds another chapter to that collective oeuvre, chronicling his days pitching for the Brooklyn Dodgers during the team’s heyday, when trailblazing Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color barrier and “dem Bums” were one of three storied New York franchises (along with the Yankees and Thomson’s Giants) who dominated the Major Leagues. Rather than a prototypical tale of overcoming inner demons or rising above childhood poverty, however, the author offers a kinder, gentler tale, which starts with a loving and supportive family and concludes not with the crowning achievement of a World Series triumph, but rather with a crushing failure—the aforementioned “Shot”—followed by a gradual decline into mediocrity. Branca does, however, remove some luster from Thomson’s historic homer by detailing how the rival Giants used a high-powered telescope to steal other teams’ signs, an ignominious stain on an otherwise remarkable season of baseball that is well documented in Joshua Prager’s masterful The Echoing Green (2006). Despite the circumstances, Branca evinces little bitterness: He married the girl of his dreams, enjoyed post-career success as an insurance salesman and even got some merchandising mileage out of a friendship with Thomson that developed years after their careers had ended. Like a ballpark frank, it might be a little overdone, and some bits might be tough to swallow, but you can’t help but enjoy it.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4516-3687-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
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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