A scholarly approach to the refashioning of the Negro leagues and its effects on organized baseball.
The story of a black Latino's rise and fall while reshaping America's favorite pastime.
Burgos (Playing America’s Game: Baseball, Latinos, and the Color Line, 2007) recounts the life of Alex Pompez, “the Harlem numbers king who became professional baseball's greatest importer of Latin American talent.” Though Pompez became well-known for his high-stakes gambling, he used his winnings to fund his passion, baseball. Ostensibly, the book is about baseball, though it soon becomes clear that it's actually a study in race relations. Burgos is at his best when he addresses the race issue, considering the surroundings and offering insight into mid-20th-century Harlem. The middle of the story drowns in Pompez’s legal woes (racketeering charges brought against him by an overzealous prosecutor with political ambitions), though after the trial, the narrative finally returns to its roots—the influx of foreign-born players whom Pompez ushered into the game. The story eventually expands to include Jackie Robinson's momentous integration to Major League Baseball, and the author notes how this progressive act prompted professional teams to sign Latino players as well. Burgos also explores integration’s negative effects, especially how Robinson's entrance into the Majors served as “the beginning of a massive talent drain from the Negro leagues into organized baseball.” The author writes that Pompez’s life story is “more than the redemption song of a criminal mastermind.” Instead, it “illustrates the promise of America and its lived contradictions during the twentieth century, especially when it comes to how the color line influenced just about every aspect of American life”—including the national pastime.
A scholarly approach to the refashioning of the Negro leagues and its effects on organized baseball.Pub Date: May 3, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8090-9479-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 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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