Probstein (Ford Professor of Engineering, Emeritus/MIT) offers a delightful life story of his father, Honest Sid, “a gambler, a horseplayer, a bookie… a ticket scalper” and an all-around nice guy.
“Even though his lifestyle was crooked,” writes Probstein of his father, “his intentions were loving and honorable.” It was just that he had neither an interest in nor a temperament for a real job. In his youth, in the early decades of the past century, he’d been a promising baseball player—until he threw a game. He’d tried being a booking agent for vaudeville acts—Adam and Eve the Twin Bowling Monkeys were a big draw—but that was too straight a profession. And so, seemingly inevitably, he made his life and living amid the denizens of New York’s Broadway—shady characters with bright suits that Damon Runyon would later turn into American archetypes. This, then, was the setting of Probstein’s childhood. His playgrounds were boxing gyms, betting parlors and theater basements along the Great White Way. While other kids learned to hunt or fish with their dads, Probstein learned to handicap horse races and calculate betting odds, skills that would serve him well in his later science career. Life was not easy for a freelancing ne’er-do-well and his family in Depression era New York. A good week would mean Sid brought home a large stack of cash to his wife, and the love of his life, Sally. A bad week meant the shylocks would come calling. Good times meant Sunday dinner at Lindy’s, bad times meant quick exits from transient hotels. Nevertheless, Probstein adored his father and this affection imbues the book with an appealing nostalgia. A lithe, dashing figure in his tailored suits, Sid was never anything but kind and devoted to both his son and Sally. An eternal optimist, he was sure that the next bet, the next horse race, would be their ticket to the good life. It never happened, but despite the bumps along the way, Probstein cherished life with this charming dreamer of a dad. With humor, a rich eye for detail and a storyteller’s knack, the author brings to life a time and place now long gone. Probstein is clearly having a good time here—the reader will as well.
Pub Date: May 26, 2009
ISBN: 978-1440141881
Page Count: 193
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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